Rec Bishop Yet more intergalactic experiences

To infinity and beyond!

If you were an astronaut what 

would you pack?

Food seems to be high on our list!

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We have started to roller paint backgrounds for our cut and stick rockets.

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We have lots of good ideas for our cut and stick aliens.

 All we need now is for the snow to melt so we can be in school putting our plans into action!

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Rec Bishop - Out of this world learning!

Out of this world!

This week we have returned to outer space and continued our intergalactic 

learning journey!

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The role play has been popular as usual. 

There have been so many different 

jobs to do...

we have been on space walks, run engineering checks on our shuttle and worked in mission control sending messages to the astronauts. As well as all this, we have also used our imagination to create different landscapes for the aliens.

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Our work on the iPads just keeps 

getting better and better.

 Stanley used some of the special effect tools to finish off the background to his rocket.

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The alien themed continued into our number work. We have started to use a method called the ‘bar model’ this helps us visualise the number facts we need to learn.

Frances and Stanley really enjoyed investigating ways of making 10. 

Joel used the ‘bar model’ to help him solve subtraction problems.

There are 10 aliens in the rocket.

If 5 aliens flew off.

How many would be left? 

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Nursery- Snow day

The children were so excited yesterday when the outside classroom was covered in snow.  What else could we do but forget about what we had planned, get wrapped up, put on our wellies and go outside to have some fun!  Everyone loved it, we made patterns in the snow, made snowmen and threw snowballs at the wall and sheds.  Whilst we were having all this fun we also looked at what makes snow and talked about what would happen if it warmed up.

I would love to see some photos from your snow days at home, please do email them to me and I will share them on the blog.  Thank you.

Nursery - Problem solving

When a bean bag got stuck up a tree in the outside classroom two of our Nursery children decided they were going to try and get it down.  First they tried to get it down by throwing another bean bag up hoping it would knock it down.  When that didn't work they decided to try using hockey sticks, but oh no they couldn't reach. They then thought that if they stood on a chair they might be able to reach, and hey presto it worked!  It was such a good example of team work, well done!

Nursery - Chinese New Year

We had a wonderful week last week learning all about Chinese New Year.  We had lots of themed activities which all the children loved exploring.  The children loved hearing the Chinese New Year story and loved retelling it using different puppets.  One of our favourite parts was making our Chinese feast, we made a stir fry and served it with egg fried rice and had prawn crackers.  I was so proud of all the children for trying it and on the whole they all really enjoyed it and even came back for seconds!  

We also inspired some of our children to go home and decorate their house for Chinese New Year and even make their own Chinese New Year feast!

Emma with her Chinese feast, thank you for sharing the photo.

RMcCabe - The Year of the Dog

Happy Chinese New Year! Over the week we explored this celebration through lots of different activities. We watched videos of parades with dancing lions and dragons and listened to Chinese music. When we were outside the children were teamwork toucans and had a go at creating their own costumes.

In maths we have been practising making numbers to one hundred and beyond. To develop our understanding, we used different objects to explore tens and ones like coins and Dienes blocks. We also continued our exploration of odd and even numbers.

Harry and Leo made dragon faces using the tap tap shapes and Red group used the Numicon to make twenties numbers by combining two ten pieces and adding ones. Lots of children enjoy the Tracing Station to improve their pencil control; this week they have been tracing dragons, dogs and messages.

We have really enjoyed exploring this Chinese tradition. Which animal in the Chinese Zodiac are you? Do you know what happened to the cat...?

Rec Bishop Chinese New Year

This week we have had great fun learning about Chinese New Year.

We are really lucky to have Frances in our class who was able to explain how she had celebrated the New Year with her family.

Whilst reading with Mrs Tunstall we read a book about Chinese New Year. 

It has helped us to learn so much about the different traditions involved in this festival.

During our outside time we have made 

Chinese dragons.

Some of us played the musical instruments as the others danced with the dragon.

Setting up our Chinese restaurant.

Counting the chopsticks gave us the opportunity to practice counting in 2’s

We have had some wonderful Chinese character writing on the iPads this week –

Mr Ward will be really proud of us independently using the Drawing Pad skills he has taught us

Our favourite activity of the week had to be eating Chinese stir fry. We thought eating with chopsticks would be easy but…

it was really tricky – 

but we had a really good try!!

Harry was keen to share his learning at home. He drew all animals that were in the race held to name the different years in the Chinese calendar.

Fantastic Harry!

RMcCabe - Yummy Chinese Food!

In Reception we like to learn about different cultures and celebrations.This week we have been learning about Chinese New Year and this afternoon we made some Chinese dishes. Everybody tried some of everything! We made a vegetable chow mein stir fry and egg fried rice with prawn crackers. The class verdict: DELICIOUS!

Nursery - Construction

We have had a lovely time today exploring the construction area today.  Our main focus was to work together as a team to build and construct. We looked at where all the different equipment was and talked about all the different things we could make.  Blue group where amazing! They were wonderful teamwork toucans, helping each other to carry the heavy bricks and planks.  I loved listening to the language they were using to talk to each other about where they were going to place the different objects; they were also using some fabulous positional language!  The model kept growing and growing with the additions of tin cans (chimneys) and smaller wooden blocks.  Some of blue group thought it was hilarious how they had got stuck and then had to problem solve how they were going to get out (which I am happy to say they did).  Once the building was at an end we then talked about what we have to do when we have finished…tidy up!  They again worked as wonderful team work toucans to tidy everything away.  Well done blue group!

Nursery- Pancakes anyone?

As we aren’t here next week for Pancake day we thought we would make it our focus and inspiration for this week. The children have had lots of fun exploring our pancake themed activities and loved making (and eating) pancakes with different toppings! The children never fail to amaze me at how engrossed they become in the activities and inject a little of their own imagination and magic to create something new and wonderful!
I was so proud of a group of children that decided they were going to write shopping lists so they could go to the shop and buy pancake ingredients! Their writing was amazing and showed the wonderful progression they are making!

Nursery- Mop painting

We are having a fab (and very messy) time this week painting with mops in our outside classroom. As one of our focus’ this week has been colour we thought we would explore it in a different way. The children are loving it and are so amazed at the different colours they can make and as always the language they are using blows me away! Well done Nursery!

Rec Bishop Looking forward to next week

Out of this world!

Our journey is now heading into outer space!!

On this mission we will be learning all there is to know about rockets, astronauts, the planets in our solar system but also using our imagination to create moonscapes and aliens.

Work in progress

Yoda is going to inspire us to read!

His cave is having the finishing touches added as you read this blog!

It would be great to really fine tune the classroom with things you are truly excited about! So, let me know your thoughts by posting a comment.

Rec Bishop Linking our learning and a fishy update!

Where’s that bear?

Following last week’s Bear Hunt work Green and Blue group linked their learning making footprints outside with the natural objects. Great work guys!

Thank you Mrs Bulleyment for helping us.

Bee-Bots

During his planning time Tyler created a 3D map on the carpet using the resources we had for the Magic Train Ride. He then used last week’s learning to help him to program the Bee-Bot so it travelled around his map.

Fishy Update!

Adding paper chain legs to our octopus and paper fan fins to our fish were our finishing touches before Mrs Tunstall did a magnificent job of hanging them from the classroom ceiling.

These are something to be really proud of guys – we all worked as a brilliant team!

Over the sea to the land!

Our How will we get there? display is helping us to record our learning journey. We have now moved from the sea to the land.

Our houses are ready to cut out and added to the scene.

We are using lots of different images to help us with our work.