On Monday, we visited the woodland area. We arrived at Basecamp and listened to our focus text, ‘The Gingerbread Man’. As we explored the woodland area we were surprised to find some special visitors! Looking up high and searching down low, we located all of the gingerbread people.

This week, during our cooking session, we baked our own gingerbread loaf cake. We used similar ingredients to our gingerbread people, last week. We developed our cooking techniques again. One of our main focuses was using a hot plate to make a syrup. We discussed how to stay safe around the hot plate and ensured we followed these as we stirred the ingredients, in the saucepan.

We have really enjoyed developing our physical and gross motor skills during our session in the soft play area. We are very lucky to be able to visit this area every week, during the first half of spring term.

This half term, in art, we will be exploring the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. He is best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of fruits and vegetables. We used a range of fruits and vegetables to explore the different prints they made when dipped into paint and then printed. We used the different prints and patterns to creat our own self-portraits, building on our skills, from previous lessons.

This week, we have started to read our first focus text of our new topic, ‘Food, Glorious Food’. The storybook we will be reading for the next few weeks is, ‘The Gingerbread Man’. It was only right, to bake our own gingerbread people, to get immersed in the story. We used a range of cooking techniques to mix, roll and cut the dough. Look at how our gingerbread men and women turned out!

You can listen to our story at home too, by watching the video below.

On Thursday, we began our gymnastics unit. We have become familiar with apparatus, focusing on mats and benches. Nicola modelled a simple routine, that involved different methods of travelling and a jump for us to imitate. We rolled, balanced as we walked across the bench, jumped off before finishing with another log roll. We are now going to think about how to incorporate a range of balances into our routines.

Oakley has been awarded Champions of the Week for Fox class, this week. The staff in Foxes have been blown away by his efforts and enthusiasm to use his new PECs communication system. Well done Oakley!

Happy New Year to our wonderful Fox families, we hope you all had a lovely Christmas and New Year! On Wednesday, we returned back to school. We could not wait to see our friends and familiar adults! Our classroom environment looked very different. There were lots of food related items, hanging from the ceiling. This is ready for us to become immersed in our new topic, ‘Food Glorious Food’. Below is our website overview, highlighting our intended learning for this term.

We spoke about our New Year celebrations and enjoyed rewatching the colourful fireworks, in London from New Years Eve. We designed beautiful firework scenes and 2025 artwork. We also spoke about New Year resolutions. We first thought about things we are already good at and then discussed the things that we might want to improve on more, during 2025.

We have been learning about the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Hanukkah lasts 8 days and was celebrated between the 25th December and 2nd January. We listened carefully to the story of Hanukkah and why it is important to remember the events for Jewish people. We then engaged in lots of Hanukkah craft activities.

In cooking, we baked traditional Hanukkah savoury biscuits. We used a range of our cooking techniques by measuring, mixing, kneading. Once the dough was carefully mixed together, we left it to prove. It was amazing to watch as the dough expanded. The risen dough was used to roll into two sausage shapes before being plaited together.

This week, Seth is our Fox Champion! During our Maths session, on Friday, Seth listened carefully during the focused group session was answering questions to showcase his knowledge and then whizzed through his independent tasks, even completing an additional challenge question. WOW Seth! What an amazing mathematician!

We have completed our first term, of the academic year! We have already made lots of memories and positive relationships with each other. We have also engaged beautifully with a range of activities and events! We are already looking forward to continuing our successes when we return in January, ready for the spring term.

On Wednesday, we visited Santa’s grotto! We got time to speak with Santa, telling him all about what we are hoping to open on Christmas Day. Santa reminded us to leave some tasty treats out for him on Christmas Eve. Some of us gave Santa a high five, hug and even sat on his lap.

We ended our festivities with our Oakwood Christmas sing and sign a-long concert. We sang and danced along to some of our favourite songs. We even took to the stage to showcase three of our songs. We have been busily practising over the recent weeks, to perfect our performance. Our confidence truly shone and the smiles on the faces of our family members, in the audience , was amazing!

Thank you so much for all the family members that were able to join us. It was lovely to see so many of you.

We hope that all of our family and friends have an amazing Christmas and we can’t wait to see you all again, in the new year!

Lots of love, Nicola, Catherine, Jade, Michelle and Sophie xxxx

As Christmas is fast approaching, we have been busy writing our own letters to Santa. We thought carefully about the presents we would ask for and used our sound and letter knowledge to write them on Christmas list. Have a look below at our amazing writing!

On Thursday, we all tucked into our Christmas lunches prepared by our fabulous kitchen staff. It was absolutely delicious! Our table was decorated with our own placemats and we enjoyed wearing our decorated Christmas headbands. We couldn’t help with finishing with some dancing along to the Christmas music.

We have had a creative Christmas flare in Foxes. This week, we have designed our own Christmas tree decorations, Christmas wreaths and Christmas cards. Our crafts will be making their way home, next week.

We have had another successful week, in the swimming pool. This week, we have worked on developing our skills and techniques when swimming on our front and back. Some of us have also mastered our floating by holding a star shape position underaided for a few seconds! We truly are swimming SUPERstars now!

On Wednesday, we were extremely lucky to be invited to the ‘film festival’ at Cineworld, Bentley Bridge. We sat beautifully as we watched ‘Migration’. It made us laugh

This week, our champion is Matilda! Matilda has impressed us in so many different ways this week. She has tried extremely hard with her reading in RWI. Matilda is using her sound knowledge to read words independently. She has also wowed us during swimming, where she worked the whole lesson, without any swimming aids. Well done Matilda!

Over the last few weeks, in our PE sessions, we have been focusing on developing our skills that can be used in game situations. So far, we have developed our rolling, throwing, bouncing and catching skills, by ensuring we are following the correct technique. Next week, we are going to move onto developing our kicking skills – a very different way of moving the ball.

Over the last few years, friends and families of Oakwood and many generous businesses have been fundraising to help raise money for our new school minibus. Very recently, we managed to reach our target total! On Friday, we were invited to a very special assembly along with Daz. Daz is a musician from ‘Daz’s Rock for Charity’. He is one of our kind sponsors who also raised money for our new minibus. During the assembly, Daz performed a variety of songs for us. We sang, danced and even joined in with the conga!

 We cannot wait for all our about adventures, on our new minibus!

At 11 o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we remember all the soldiers past and present. To remember the soldiers that fought or continue to fight in wars, we learnt about the importance of Remembrance and the significance of the poppy.

Whilst we were paying our respects, we watched the animation below. This helped us to understand more about Remembrance.

During our music session with Bev, we learnt about Remembrance parades and how music is a big part of the procession. We played the drums and marched around the classroom, to form our own Fox marching band.

We have enthusiastically engaged in a range of Children in Need activities to show our support for those who may not be as fortunate as us. We decided that it would be the perfect opportunity to use our cooking session to bake some sweet treats that we could sell to the Oakwood adults. We made a yellow Victoria sponge and spotty cupcakes.

This week, we had not one… but two Fox champions. Baneet and Logan have impressed their adults for two very different reasons. Baneet showcased her fantastic mathematics skills to group objects. She worked independently throughout and even extended her knowledge to complete an additional challenge. Logan has beautifully modelled our school Golden rules and we could not be prouder of him! Well done to you both!

This week, we have been learning about the festival of light – Diwali. We enjoyed listening to the Diwali story and learning about traditions that happen during Diwali. We have completed lots of different Diwali activities, creating our own Rangoli pattern plates and diya lamps.

During our cooking session, we made our own vegetable samosas, a popular treat shared during Diwali feasts. We had to use a range of skills and techniques including peeling, chopping, boiling, frying and mashing. Our ingredients were then folded into triangles using filo pastry.

This half term, we are swimming at Oak Park. During our first lesson, we revisited our learnt skills, kicking our legs and scooping the water. We have been so impressed with how much the children have remembered from our last lesson.

Our focus in maths is sharing and grouping. We have been learning how to share objects into two groups so that there are equal amounts. We know that we need to share the objects one at a time to make sure we are accurate.

Ruth and baby Tommy came to visit our class. Baby Tommy is one month old now. We enjoyed welcoming him to our school and seeing Ruth again.

Khaled is our Champion, this week. He impressed us during our first swimming session of the year. Sometimes, Khaled can find it tricky when in the water but this week showed us his improved confidence. Well done Khaled!

 This week, concluded our Autumn woodland adventures. We have been learning lots about the Autumnal changes that occur and what better place to observe these than down at the woods. Whilst we were exploring, we noticed that there were lots of crunchy leaves on the forest floor that were brown and deep orange in colour. Some of the trees still had lots of green leaves and other trees had a fewer leaves that were orange and yellow in colour.

 Spooky season is fast approaching and we have been sharing our excitement in school by engaging in lots of spooky crafts. In Dan’s art session this week, we snipped autumnal leaves to create pumpkin collages. We continued developing our fine motor skills by creating witches and pumpkin spooky faces. Have a look at some of our fantastic creations below.

 It is Halloween tradition to eat chocolate and toffee apples. We watched as the chocolate melted in the microwave before stirring our apples to give a good chocolate covering. We then sprinkled hundreds and thousands on top for decoration. We left them for a few hours so the chocolate hardened.

What a fantastic and busy half term we have all had. The weeks have flown by! We hope that all our families have a enjoyable half term break and look forward to hearing about your adventures. If you would like to send any photos of your adventures, please email them to nunderwood@oakwood.walsall.sch.uk.

Don’t forget, next half term, we will be swimming at Oak Park on Monday afternoons and our PE slot will remain on Thursday afternoons.

Nicola