Our new learning theme this term is 'What is Cold?'. During this learning theme we will be thinking about why some animals hibernate in winter and some move to warmer places. We will be looking at where in the world is cold and what animals we may find there and how they can survive. We will also be doing lots of ice and melting investigating. 

These are some of the texts that we will be reading and exploring this term...

Week 1 update

Happy New Year to you all! It has been so lovely to welcome all of the children back to school this term. This week we have stared our new learning theme with the question "What is cold?". We have enjoyed sharing our class poem of Jack Frost that we are learning and adding actions to. To start the week we went on a walk looking for signs of Winter and learnt about deciduous and evergreen trees. We loved explored some blocks of ice and thought about how we can describe it based on what it looks and feels like. We made predictions to see how long it would take to melt and kept checking the tuff spot to see! We found lots more ice on our next walk later in the week and the children particularly enjoyed creating watery 'traps' to see if we can catch Jack Frost. They were so excited to come back in on Thursday morning to see that Jack Frost had paid us another visit, turning our watery traps into ice.

Week 2 Update

We enjoyed pretending to be Jack Frost and created an ice dance in the hall this week. At the end we all melted down to the floor! In Maths we have been exploring 'one more' looking at and making staircase patterns. We enjoyed a team challenge to see which group could make a 1-5 staircase first. We have also found out more about the polar regions and discovered which animals live in the Arctic and Antarctica, and learnt about the story of the explorer Ernest Shackleton.

Week 3 Update

As part of our learning theme "What is cold?" We have shared the Inuit tale of "The Polar Bear Son" and learning about Igloo's, which is the Inuit word for snow house. In our maths this week we have enjoyed sharing songs to help us learn about the composition of 5. Mrs Sims's favourite is 5 little polar bears. In Forest School this week, we were inspired by the story "The Gruffalo's Child" to create our own Stickmen.

Week 4 Update

We have been busy learning lots more digraphs this week, our most recent digraphs are oo, ar, or, ur and ow. On Wednesday we found out about Lunar New Year. This year it is the year of the Snake. We shared the story of The Great race and how the order of the years was named after the animals in the race. We enjoyed lots of craft activities and some Chinese snack in the afternoon.

Week 5 Update

This week it is Children's Mental Health Awareness week and the theme is 'Know Yourself, Grow Yourself'. We have been thinking about how we are the same and different and what we are good at doing and would like to get better at. We enjoyed playing a human sorting game to think about similarities and differences from hair colour, eye colour, boy/girl, height etc. and have had some good discussions about our strengths.
Each day we have thought about a different challenge;
- Something you are good at
- Something you want to get better at
- Someone who is special to you
- Something that makes you smile
- Something that makes you special
We have also enjoyed learning some different 5 minute mindfulness games over the week.