Getting creative in hook week…

The children have enjoyed hooking into our new expedition ‘What happens where the sea meets the shore?’ We have been busy immersing our classroom and have been very creative…

The children have used their drawing skills to draw a fish. We then critiqued our work in crew, being kind and specific so we know how to make them even better on our next draft!

We ended our week making our ocean bottles…

What happens where the sea meets the shore?

We’ve had a great first week back hooking into our summer term expedition titled ‘What happens where the sea meets the shore?’.

We have been reading Commotion in the Ocean by Giles Andreae and learning some really interesting facts about lot of different sea creatures. Did you know that an octopus has three hearts and blue blood? The children in Class Two do!

This stimulated lots of exciting discussions about how we could immerse our classroom to represent out new expedition. The children chose to make an octopus along with lots of other sea creatures! Beautiful work Class Two!

We are Sea Explorers!

As our hook week has rolled out, Nursery have had lots of fun exploring and immersing themselves in all things lurking beneath the surface of the sea, underpinned by our hook text, “Commotion in the Ocean” By Giles Andreas. The children have searched around Nursery for clues of what they may find in the sea? They have learned about how these sea creatures survive and their anatomical features such as; gills, scales, fins and flippers.

The children then created fabulous sea creatures of their own using various craft materials, mediums and techniques. These include jiggling Jellyfish, Octopuses and shimmering Fishes – just look at our beautiful work!

Finally the children have worked hard on beginning to understand and explore our guiding question for our new exciting summer expedition “What happens when the sea meets the shore?”

As part of our Thoughtful Thursday Crew the children used their own experiences to draw pictures of what they recall visually about the seaside and talked about, What does the sand feel like? How does it look on the beach? Their ideas were collected in crews to form spider diagrams.

We then practically explored how the sand and water make the shore by creating sensory sea bottles using sand and blue coloured water. The children were thrilled to experiment and see how the sand and water mixed and then settled separately, creating their own beach in a bottle. It was a fabulous experience for all.

Stained glass windows

We have shown amazing determination and perseverance in Year One whilst creating our stained glass windows. We are really proud of our hard work and how well we drew lines and coloured in staying inside the lines. We think they will look beautiful in our classroom.

Meet the Author

Key Stage One had an exciting visit from the author Phil Sheppard this morning. He told us all about his love of stories, books and reading as a child and how he became an author. He introduced us to his non fiction books all about Doncaster and shared some of his stories with us before holding a book signing. We’re looking forward to sharing some of our own work with him at the end of our expedition.

Crafty Afternoon

We took our inspiration from Doncaster Minister and had a go at recreating our own stained glass windows. We also wondered where we belong in the world so we used maps to create circular diagrams to show.

We think they look great – what do you think?

RE Recap

We spent some time this morning working collaboratively to sort religious symbols, places of worship and special books into which religion they belong to. We had to do lots of talking and listening but together we all succeeded.

Hook Week expert

Geoff came in and spoke to us about aerial images and how they can help us learn more about the world around us. He shared with us some images of Norton and we had a great time locating familiar landmarks. Geoff is coming back during our Geography case study to send the drone up and take some new aerial photographs with us.

We wonder how aerial images will help us in our expedition?

Key Stage 1 Crew Challenge

Our KS1 crews took part in a Humpty Dumpty crew challenge to mark our Norton Campus science week. We investigated materials to see which one would make the best jacket to protect Humpty Dumpty when he fell from the wall. After investigating the materials we voted for the ones we thought would offer the most protection. We also discussed how we could make the test fair and made predictions for the results.