This week is Children’s Mental Health Awareness Week. The theme this year is ‘Know Yourself, Grow Yourself!’ We started the week by looking at some of the different characters from Disney’s Inside Out. We thought about what we knew about the characters and discussed where we thought they might sit within our zones of regulation. When we circled up for our debrief we realised that some of the characters might not just fit in one zone and the zone wasn’t always the one we thought!
Some really thoughtful conversations happening in Crew this morning ⭕️
We have been busy in class five today looking at different seed packets. We thought about which we liked and why. We then thought carefully about which important features were on the packets that we would need to include if we were going to create our own. We came up with a list to help us with our writing this week.
Some amazing collaboration and kind critique – well done.
Class 1 have been securing their understanding of the composition of numbers in recent weeks. We have been investigating part part whole relations, seeing that 5 can be made from 3 and 2. The children enjoyed acting out ‘5 Little Speckled Frogs’, which allowed children to deepen their knowledge through practical experiences.
In our recent counting collection session the children had some great ideas when recording their mathematical thinking. Keep up the great work!
This week in phonics we are spelling longer, more challenging words. The children truly blew me away with their attempts today. They used their segmenting fingers and wrote down all the phonemes they could hear in the word. Keep up the great work Class 1!
In crew this morning we looked at the characters from Inside Out and thought about which of the zones of regulation they would belong in. For some of them it was tricky to put them in just one zone!
In our check out we thought about which of the characters we feel most like today, luckily we didn’t have any Angers or Ennuis in crew this morning!
This week Nursery and EYFS had the most exciting expert visitors arrive at school in their shells! The children have been hooked into our latest text “How does an egg hatch?” By Eric Carle by watching real chicken eggs hatch courtesy of The Happy Chick Company. The children were so excited and completely in awe of seeing the eggs and observing the daily changes of how the eggs have changed and chicks have grown and hatched. A truly magnificent experience met with care, concern and compassion for the chicks from our youngest children.
On the first day the children observed the eggs and made predictions of what would happen and who might come out of the eggs if they were left inside the incubator. Some of the children’s ideas included; “a penguin”, “a caterpillar”, “a dinosaur”, “a chicken”, “a duck” and “a baby chick”. They drew the eggs inside the incubator in our message centre (below).
On the second day the chicks had began to hatch and the children were amazed to witness the hatchlings make their journey out of the eggs using their “Egg Tooth” one of the new words we learnt from our key vocabulary. To consolidate their understanding of the hatching process the children took part in a chick life cycle hunt in our outdoor area. When the children found photos of the key points of development, they brought them to our crew circle and we examined them and ordered them in the correct sequence using key words from our Maths learning; “First, next and then”.
As we investigated the life cycle further Nursery thought about the most important stage of the cycle. Our text explained that the hen makes a nest that is “warm and dry” (more of our key vocabulary) using sticks and straw. The children explored that the eggs we had in school didn’t have a nest or a mummy hen to sit on them to keep them warm, instead they had an incubator to replace those things. However in the wild or on the farm, there probably wouldn’t be any electricity for an incubator, so the children learnt that building the nest as a “warm and cosy” home for the eggs to be sat on, is the most important part of the process that allows the fertilised eggs to grow. The children had lots of fun making their own chocolate coated shredded wheat nests and filling them with chocolate eggs to show the nests significance.
The children observed the changes in the state of the chocolate as it was melted and then again as it was mixed with the shredded wheat and cooled in the fridge to harden again. They thought carefully of the order in which they were constructing the nests, again using our sequencing vocabulary; “First, then and next”.
In provision this week the children have learnt the song “Chick, Chick, Chick, Chick, Chicken”, painted chicks using yellow paint and a fork to mark on their fluffy feathers. They have sculpted eggs, nests and chickens from play dough, taken part in a cut and stick version of the life cycle of a chick practising their cutting skills. The children have also examined and matched mummy and baby animals together in pairs, learning the new vocabulary of the infant animals names eg; Horse and foal, Cow and calf, Duck and duckling and noticing the differences between the young and older animal as they grow and change.
Finally Nursery were super excited and eager to prepare their own chick box in preparation for us to host our own chicks in Nursery, now that they are all hatched and getting stronger and ready to be handled with care.
Class 3 enjoyed practising and developing their shading skills this week. It was great to see their hard work pay off when they applied these skills to their final beetroot drafts.
In design and technology they learnt how to safely use a grater to grate the beetroot ready for our delicious beetroot, banana and apple smoothies!
This afternoon KS1 had an exciting visit from Mr Hull, who showed us all his different musical instruments. From the banjos to the base guitar, and clarinet to drums we explored it all.
