On Monday, during our community visit session, we visited Grasmere Garden Centre. Ruth set us the task of finding a range of plants, seeds and bulbs. We enjoyed exploring the different colours and smells around the garden centre before making our choices. These will be used to plant around our playground.

Our newest member of Fox class come to join our classroom. We were all so thoughtful being kind and gentle to baby Charlie. He certainly seemed to enjoy our foxy cuddles! It was such a special treat. Jade even showed us how make a baby bottle. We already can’t wait for Jade and Charlie to come and visit us again.

In cooking, we built on our skills learnt from last week. We remembered how we have to combine the ingredients by rubbing in. Once our shortbread biscuit was baked we could then begin to layer. We melted both caramel and chocolate to pour so that we could build the different layers. It was then put in the fridge to harden.

Our champion, this week, is Ollie! Ollie has displayed such fantastic knowledge and recall from our recent topic on ‘Lifecycles’. Kelvin, one of our secondary headteachers, visits each morning and Ollie happily shares a new lifecycle with Kelvin! It has been amazing to see such brilliant engagement with learning. Well done Ollie!

This week, we have continued to bake sweet treats linked to our developed understanding of rationed foods. We have developed a new cooking technique, called rubbing in, which is required when making shortbread biscuits. We measured our ingredients and used our ‘fairy fingers’ to the combine them together. This made a breadcrumb consistency which was chilled before rolling out. Our biscuits certainly tasted delicious, We are going to build on this, to make caramel shortbread which will require layering ingredients.

Our focus in PE, this half term has been gymnastics. During our first session, we explored different ways of travelling, linked to animal movements. We carefully considered our body positions and heights to be working out. This week, we have linked these together with some simple balances. When performing balances, we tried really hard to stay still for at least 5 seconds. We also learnt how important it is to point fingers and toes. Once we were confident in performing a straight, star, arch, dish and tuck balance we incorporated these into a simple routine with some different methods of travelling. Have a look at our full performances on Evidence for Learning.

Two of our Fox boys were invited to complete their Level 1 bikeability training course with official A*Stars instrcutors. Seth and Ollie had to show that they were capable of driving the trikes, stopping when instructed and manipulating the bike to follow a simple route. The boys did excellently and were awarded their Level 1 certificates during Champion assembly.

Our champion, this week, is Khaled! Khaled’s effort during target sessions has been amazing. He has been working on developing his independence with reading, through the ‘See and Learn’ programme. Khaled initially started by matching picture cards together, slowly progressing to matching a picture card with a verbalised word to now recognising words independently to match to its corresponding picture card. The progress Khaled has made, in such a short period, is phenomenal. The staff in Foxes are so proud of you!

Our VE Day celebrations began last week, during our community visits. We took the minibus to the National Memorial Arboretum, in Alrewas. We explored the site, taking in the range of memorials, commemorating those who helped us.

On Thursday, preparations began for our VE Day Oakwood Street Party. The children made a past-time snack, jam sandwiches. We carefully spread the jam over the bread before cutting into halves and quarters.

We discussed the importance of VE Day and how the war had impacted Brits. We learnt that certain foods were rationed. We used this knowledge to make our own eggless cupcakes. We followed the step-by-step instructions to measure, mix and pour the ingredients.

With flags in hand and our food prepared, we were finally ready for our VE Day street party. We were joined by the other upper primary and secondary classes to share food, dance and sing along to 1940 songs and play wartime games. It was a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon, had by all.

Throughout the day, we engaged in a range of VE Day crafts. Here are our beautiful silhouette soldiers, standing in poppy fields! We have also painted our own Union flags and collaged paper plate poppies.

After such a busy week, Seth was awarded ‘Champion of the Week’ for Fox class. He impressed the staff during our English session. We have been reading the traditional tale, ‘The Enormous Turnip’. This week, our focus was sequencing the key events from the story. Seth showed confidence, joining in our discussions to order the story correctly. Well done Seth!

Welcome back, we hope our Fox families had a lvoely Easter break. We have had an addition to our Fox class. Jade, our amazing teaching assistant went on maternity leave, just before the Easter holidays and gave birth to a beautiful baby boy called Charlie! We are all so excited for Jade to come and visit us so we can meet baby Charlie and give him lots of snuggles. Here are some photos Jade has sent us to share with us.

On Monday, we returned back to school and could not wait to see our friends and familiar adults! Our classroom environment looked very different with flower decorations hanging from the ceiling. This is in preparation for us to become immersed in our new topic, this term, ‘Gardener’s World’. Below is our website overview, highlighting our intended learning for this term.

We have already started to learn about plants. In science, we have been locating the different parts of a plant. We learnt where the flower, leaves, roots, stem and petals are. We used this knowledge to dissect flowers, clipping each of the different parts off individually. Once cut up, we were able to group them together, into each of the different parts.

Next week, we will be celebrating VE Day. To mark the occasion, we are going to bake traditional wartime recipes. During the war certain foods became rationed. Here we are making British Victoria sponge cake. We successfully used our pre-learnt measuring, mixing and spreading skills.

Foxes Champion, this week, is Matilda! She has been extremely helpful around the classroom. We have really noticed her support during tidy up time. Matilda will ensure that she helps tidy all areas of the classroom, rather than just the activity she has been working at.