Thursday was a great day. We completed the Walkathon and celebrated the end of our first half term together with a pumpkin party.

After 4 laps of the track playground there was some tired legs but the dancing and fun games we played during our party and some sweet treats ensured a quick recovery. Well done to all the children for their participation in the walkathon and well done and thank you to all parents for collecting sponsor money for us.

Our nocturnal animal of the week was the spider so we made some fun spider hats which we sported proudly as we walked and for our pumpkin party. We also made some beautiful lanterns and decorated spider biscuits. Let’s not forget designing our pumpkin decorations and working together to make the Butterly entry for the Satellite pumpkin carving competition.

We worked together, demonstrating our growing teamwork and cooperative skills to create a giant string spider web on the classroom carpet. We created quite a tangle in the end but it looked good.

This week we also considered how we say sorry when we have made a mistake and how to show that we really mean it. We considered how. Our words and actions hurt others, even if we say sorry. We used a paper person cut out and treated it kindly. Afterwards we treated it badly with unkind words and handling. We observed the damage and how to try to repair what we had done. We discovered that some wounds cannot heal quickly.

You could try the same thing at home. Try it with 2 apples. Handle one carefully and say lovely things to it. Set it aside. Take the other apple and handle it roughly: say unkind things to it and then set it aside for a short while. When you cut the apples, you will notice that the one treated with care is fresh and crisp on the inside as well as the outside. The other apple, may look fine on the outside but may show bruises inside. Even saying sorry cannot make the bruises go away.

This week also saw us begin the Boccia Challenge. We tried our skills in throwing and rolling balls competing the first 2 challenges.

If you are celebrating over the holiday at home with any pumpkin decorating or other autumnal crafts, we would love to see your creations. Please send us some photos. You may also like to look at Busy Things. There are lots of fabulous educational games and activities which will help to keep your child entertained while developing their skills. You will need a log in. The details are in your child’s diary folder. Access it from the school website.
https://www.oakwood.walsall.sch.uk/classes/home-learning

Take a look at some photos of our lovely week. There is also a video of our Dark, Dark Tale story.
hoping that you all have a wonderful happy, restful and safe half term break. The team are all looking forward to seeing everyone back in school on Tuesday 2nd November.

Can I please mind you that we will not be swimming again until January. However, we will be enjoying trips to the forest each Tuesday throughout the next half term so please make sure to be prepared with wellingtons or warm, sturdy footwear, warm and waterproof clothes.

Take care,

Paula

This week we celebrated Harvest. We learned, sang, accompanied and performed ‘Thank You God for the Harvest’. We enjoyed our school virtual assembly. We made some woven baskets, some autumn hedgehogs and some moving scarecrows.

Our nocturnal animal for this week was a bat. We made some chocolate and Rice Krispie bat treats.
This week was our penultimate swimming session for this term and it was good fun. We are looking forward to a really fun session next week.

The children have started to learn how to create some simple but amazing short animations. They used their plasticine planets and are showing how they rotate around the Earth.

As promised, we completed our class adaptation of Ruth Brown’s Dark, Dark Tale. We used school as our setting and selected a spider and fly as the characters. If you don’t know Ruth Brown’s story, take a look at the link in last weeks’ post. Below is the video that we created together as a class. We have called it A Dark, Dark School. The children helped to take and edit the photographs and together we recorded the sound.

We are very pleased with it so I hope you enjoy it.

Here is a selection of pictures from our week.

I hope you have a lovely weekend.

We are enjoying our story and have completed some lovely sequencing and writing. We can retell the story well using words and signs. Yesterday, we planned our own story based on Ruth Brown’s story. We have called it A Dark, Dark School. We hope to present that to you next week so don’t forget to take a look. In Preparation for this, the children have all taken photographs of some different locations around school and enjoyed editing them on the iPad to create some dark scenes. Last week, I posted a link to a video version of the story. There is a character lurking on every page. We have chosen our character and set it into our pictures. That is a secret for now! All will be revealed next week.

Below you will see some photographs of us working on our story. There are also some photos of us revising our o’clock and half past times by playing some group games.

For cooking, we stayed on the theme of healthy eating. As the nocturnal animal we have learned about this week is the domestic cat, we created a cat snack with rice cakes, cream cheese and some fruit and vegetables.

We continued to explore the very challenging concept of why we have day and night. We used a large lamp to represent the sun and a globe for Earth. The children rose to the challenge superbly well. They have also made some plasticine planets with Kelvin. There is some more exciting space work coming up next week.

Each day, we start a session with a calming or relaxing moment. I will drop a coupe of our favourite videos below in case you would like to explore them at home. The first link is a new one we used today and the children loved it.

The final 2 weeks of this half term will be very busy as we learn about Harvest and Halloween. It should be a lot of fun.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Paula

Today, Oakwood was supporting Macmillan and the tremendous work they do to help patients, families and others who are affected by cancer.
To find out more about their work and how you can donate, please visit

https://www.macmillan.org.uk/

All the children iced their own cake and we worked together to make a sponge cake for a satellite competition. Butterflies were runners up. Our cake was a planet. It was rather tasty too.

We have enjoyed a busy week. Bev comes to work with us in music every other week so we greatly enjoyed that. We talked about healthy eating and made a fruit salad. Some children tucked in to their salad enthusiastically. Others were less keen but it was lovely to see that every child did at least taste most of the fruits. We included strawberries, apples, kiwi, banana, melon and plums.

This week , we started a new story, A Dark,Dark Tale by Ruth Brown.

We looked for a mystery character within the illustrations and we used this to help us make predictions about what would happen next. Each week, we have learned some facts about a nocturnal animal, so this week we learned about mice. We made a mouse which involved us tracing and cutting to improve our fine motor skills and then this became a template for us to record our mouse facts on. A favourite fact was finding out that mice eat between 15 and 20 meals a day.

Next week, we are going to create a version of our own story set in school. I’m excited to see what we come up with and hope to be able to share it with you in our post next week.
Here’s a video version of the story for you to enjoy.

Of course swimming is always something that we enjoy.

Below you can see us ordering planets. The children are really good at naming each planet in order.

Swimming had to be our highlight this week. The children were all so excited. Despite this though, they were tremendously well behaved. We’re all looking forward to going again this week.
Another great activity that we all enjoyed was making bread. We focussed on the team work; all working together to make sure that the dough was kneaded well. Considering that we had some problems with the oven, it really didn’t turn out to be a bad effort at all.
Keeping the theme of teamwork going, we showed our cooperation skills while having fun with a parachute, trying to keep balls on the chute for as long as we could.

I hope you like the photos below.

Here we are enjoying the water. The bus ride was great too.

Master Bakers At Work!

Some of us were a little wary of mixing the dough initially but eventually, we all managed to give the dough a bit of a workout.

Parachute fun. A great mix of focussed concentration and much laughter.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

I cannot believe it has been a week since the last post. This week has flown by. Perhaps that is because we have had such a lovely week.

We are all getting familiar with new routines and experiences. Next week will see us beginning swimming and the children are all very excited about that.

Some of the highlights of our week have been our first music lesson with Bev. We will be enjoying these sessions every other week.

In Topic we have been thinking about night and day. We have sorted pictures, describing how we can tell what time of day it is. We have talked about our own daily routines and the passing of time and begun to discuss and explore night time events. We have learned a little about nocturnal animals, in particular this week, the hedgehog. We decorated some brioche buns using chocolate buttons as spines. They made a very tasty treat too. The children have done some very nice writing and drawing to show what they have learned about these very cute creatures.

We have also been telling the time. It has been fun making the time on small clocks.
We have enjoyed the story, ‘Peace at Last’ . Daddy Bear could not sleep because of all the noises that could be heard during the night. We sequenced and retold the story and added speech bubbles to the pictures.

At home , you might enjoy sharing the story. See the link below.

Next week we will be celebrating Harvest. You may like to make some harvest pictures and crafts.
Team work is important to us in Butterflies so the story of Little Red Hen will support some of our work in this area and help us to learn more about Harvest time. I am looking forward to working together to make bread, unlike the animals in the story. I’m sure we will all be able to share our loaves as well as the work.
You may want to make some bread at home. If you do, we would love to see any photographs.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Paula

It has been so lovely to welcome returning children and our new pupils. I have been so impressed with how they have all adjusted to their new team and new learning environment.
We have been busy getting to know our new friends.

Yesterday, we made some butterfly cup cakes, using kiwi fruit or strawberries to make the wings. This was great fun. I have added some photographs below. Today we planted some plants to care for in our classroom and we will be planting some seeds next week.
We enjoyed smelling some of the herbs.

We have been creating other crafts to show off our skills and to decorate our room.
Come back next week for some photographs of the finished work and displays.

Thank you for your support already this week.
Ruth has asked us to help create a welcome display in school. We are making some jungle animals.
If you would like to create some craft animals at home, we would love to see them.

please note that the time scale for swimming has changed. Butterflies will now be swimming this half term. Our first session will be Tuesday 21st September. Please send in swimwear, a towel and a bag. Please send in a PE kit as well if you have not done so already. It would be enormously helpful if all items are clearly named so that we can make sure any items can be returned if they go missing.

I hope to meet you you all very soon. It has been a pleasure to speak to many of you. Please email me or send a message via your child’s Home School Communication Folder if you have any worries or questions.

Have a lovely weekend.
Paula