Early Years and Key Stage One Fun Morning!

This morning children in Nursery, Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 came together to enjoy a range of activities outside. Next year, the current Reception children will be in a class with the current Year 1s, and the current Nursery children will be spending some time after lunch playing outside with Year 1 and 2. It was great to see them playing so well together, discussing their ideas, taking turns, sharing resources and exploring everything from parachute games and construction to messy art!

Going exploring!! (29th June)

This post is from 29th June, but due to a technical error it was not published then!

This week is 'Small Schools Week' and we are doing lots of exciting activities based on our whole school theme, Around the World.

Today we began our explorations by coming into school dressed as explorers! We used Google Earth to explore our school and our houses as well as looking at other countries some of us have been to, such as Spain, Italy and Croatia. We also looked at atlases, maps and the globe, made passports, binoculars and maps.

Then we chose a mode of transport and went off exploring! Some of us went by boat, or by plane, or by train - Luke decided to go exploring in a Ferrari! We discovered lots of things including tiger tracks, clues left by tigers and a ball that might have been nibbled by a tiger or a bear!! We also went exploring in the bark area where we climbed mountains, swung in trees like monkeys and crossed bridges over crocodile swamps!

We also had a special treat this morning - some strawberries and cream from Mrs Wilkinson to celebrate the start of Wimbledon!

This afternoon Mrs Wilkinson also very kindly invited us to visit her tennis courts and she taught us to play some tennis. It was a great adventure walking through the swishy swashy grass to her house and we really enjoyed learning some tennis. Harrison didn't miss a single ball when we were practising hitting the balls!

Thank you very much Mrs Wilkinson!

Funny little people...!

Yesterday we found some funny little people in our classroom... they looked just like us! We found the mini 'us' from wherever it was hiding in the room and compared its size to a friend's. Sometimes our picture was taller than someone if we are taller than them in real life, but some people found their picture was taller than other people who are actually taller in real life! Olivia's picture was bigger than Summer's, but Summer is taller than Olivia. How can that be??

We took some photos with the iPads of people close up and further away and found out that if you are near the camera when a photo is taken your face looks bigger. People who are further away look smaller. So people who were smaller in their 'mini' form than others might have been standing futher away from the camera!

We went around the classroom, comparing the height of our mini person with different things and saying which was taller. We also measured how tall our mini person was using different items such as counters and cubes. Some of us also used a tape measure to measure our height and the height of our mini self! Summer also ordered all the Nursery children's pictures by height.

"Look, the banana is bigger than me." - Harry

"I'm smaller than the spoon!" - Fallon

Dexter and Harrison have both used stacking counters to measure their person, but Harrison has used far more counters than Dexter. Why do you think that is?

"This is the same size as me." - Summer

Our travels in China!

Yesterday our travels around the world took us to... China!

We explored lots of exciting things from China including Chinese tea and tea pots, Chinese lanterns, a Chinese newspaper with writing that was made up from symbols that look very different to our own, Chinese food... and lots more!

During the morning we made some Chinese lanterns and paper chains of our own using the colour red (a very special colour in China) and Emily made her paper chain into a fantastic dragon. We watched a video of a dragon dance and made up some dances of our own, used black paint and thin brushes to write some Chinese symbols, made colourful pictures of dragons, made some red playdough with gold glitter and cooked a stir fry in the wok! We also ate some prawn crackers and some sweets that Paul's dad had brought us back from China and listened to the story The Magic Paintbrush, all about a girl called Shen who lives in China. When she paints things with her magic paintbrush they come to life! We also turned our role play cafe into a Chinese takeaway and used chopsticks on the Busy Fingers table to pick up some 'wool' noodles!

Thank you to all the parents who have brought things in for us to explore (and eat!) this week, and to Mrs Wall who gave up her time yesterday to help us make lanterns and paper chains!