Our Spring term swimming sessions have concluded, this week. We have been working exceptionally hard to develop and perfect our techniques for our front crawl and backstroke. We was rewarded with some free time on the floats, at the end of our session!
On Thursday, we were joined by our adults from home for our Easter craft PACT session. We engaged in a range of craft activities, from designing our own Easter wreaths to creating Easter artwork with paint and chalks. It was a lovely afternoon had by all. Thank you to the adults that were able to join us.
As a special treat for our families, we baked some delicious Easter treats. So far this year, we have developed a range of cooking skills and techniques. We applied these skills to make melted chocolate Easter nest cakes, marshmallow Easter rice crispie bars and Easter rocky road.
Easter preparations have begun, this week, in Fox class. We have been exploring the Easter story and the key events that take place. We developed our understanding of the significance of the cross. This led us to baking hot cross buns. We decided to take a twist on the traditional hot cross buns, instead adding apple and chocolate. We measured, mixed and kneaded our ingredients to make a squidgy dough. This was left and when we returned the yeast had helped the dough to grow!
Ollie is our Fox champion, this week after wowing us with his fantastic recall of the Easter story. Ollie listened well whilst the story was shared before helping his class to sequence the key events. Well done Ollie, what a superstar!
This week, we have been learning all about the Muslim festival, Eid al-fitr. This celebrations concludes the month of Ramadan, where Muslims have been fasting. We discussed the traditions of celebrating Eid which include, visiting the Mosque, sending and receiving gifts and also decorating homes with brightly coloured decorations. We designed and made some of our beautiful decorations.
A big part of Eid celebrations is sharing food with family and friends. During our cooking session, this week, we made a tasty South Asian dish – biryani. We prepared, chopped and fried onions. Next, we measured our spices to make the biryani sauce. This was all mixed together, along with some meat and rice. It was a delicious, some of us even ate two whole bowls!
Wishing all our wonderful Mommies, Nannies and special ladies a huge, ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ for tomorrow. We hope you love our cards and enjoy celebrating.
This week, our learning has been focused around the story, ‘The Runaway Pea’. You can listen at home too, by watching the video below.
As you can see, the pea gets into lots of unfortunate situations. We enjoyed lots of activities trying to help capture the Runaway Pea. We caught him with tweezers, unfroze him from ice blocks, used our number knowledge to add him and his friends to the correct pod.
We have continued our Holi celebrations with a special visitor. Vivenne came to teach us a Holi dance. We all listened carefully and imitated the different traditional Indian dance movements. We thoroughly enjoyed exploring the sensory materials and instruments.
On Friday, we celebrated Red Nose Day. We came to school dressed in our red clothing. We also enjoyed tucking into our own red nose biscuits. We mixed and rolled the dough before decorating with bright red raspberry jam.
This week, we have began our Holi celebrations. On Wednesday, our classroom was a sea of colour. There was glitter, confetti and coloured rice for us to explore. We enjoyed learning about the importance of Holi and how it is celebrated by Hindus. We danced along to Holi music and engaged a range of craft activities, making beautiful Rangoli patterns and coloured Spring blossom trees.
To celebrate Holi and British Science Week, the children have engaged in a range of scientific experiments, linked with the colour. The children watched in amazement throughout. The first experiment used warm water and skittles. The warm water was poured into the middle of the skittle circle. Soon after the colours began to disperse.
In the next colour experiment, we created our own tissue rainbows. We had to colour both ends of the paper towel, using felt tips, before placing them into two containers of water. The water absorbed into the paper towel and the felt tip colours ran through again meeting in the middle, making the most beautiful rainbows.
In our final investigation, we used three containers. One filled with warm warmer, one with lemon juice and the last with bicarbonate of soda. The water from boiled red cabbage was poured into each. We watched as the lemon juice container turned to a pink colour, the bicarbonate of soda container turned green while the warm water container remained a purple/blue colour.
We have been working on applying the basic movements from traditional British folk dancing. Yesterday, we worked on the second section, within our dance. We imitated a range of basic greeting models, alongside our partner. We started by waving to a partner, then shaking a partner’s hand and finally turning whilst holding a partner’s shoulders. Once we had mastered these movements, we were able to link the movements together, making our own simple sequence. We did thus so well and ensured we listened and responded to the music appropriately.
We have showcased our love for reading and books by celebrating World Book Day. We were invited to come dressed up as our favourite book characters. Can you guess who we might be?
Our day was focused around the story of ‘Supertato’. You can share the story with your families at home too, by watching below.
We engaged in a range of Supertato activities. Here are some of our photos of us capturing the evil peas using tweezers, rescuing the vegetables by snipping them free, melting the frozen evil peas. We have even designed our own superhero vegetables!
We have enjoyed celebrating Pancake Day, this week, developing our understanding of Shrove Tuesday and past traditions. We thought about what would be our favourite toppings and designed our own pancakes. We used our design plans to select and prepare our toppings.
During our PSED sessions, this half term, we are going to focus on developing our awareness of our personal hygiene. Our focus this week was brushing our teeth. We brushed along with Super Mario, ensuring that we brushed for two minutes. We will now work on making sure we brush in all the right places so we can keep our teeth healthy.
We have had two Champions in Fox class, this week. Hiba impressed us during our swimming session. On Monday, Hiba displayed improved confidence by allowing the adult to remove some of the physical supports that have been out in place as she moves across the water.
Logan has impressed us with his turn taking skills. This week, he has been encouraging his peers to join his games, allowing the other children to take turns with the football he had been using.
Wow, what a busy week we have had in Foxes! We’ve all returned so positively and ready for learning. Some important reminders, we are now swimming on Monday afternoons, at Oak Park and on Thursdays we will have a PE sessions. Please could all kits be sent into school.
We have been learning about Ramadan. Ramadan is a Muslim festival and occurs 29 days before the celebration of Eid. We learnt that during this time, Muslims will fast. This means they are unable to eat or drink between the sun rising and sun setting. To showcase our knowledge, we have engaged in a range of craft activities, decorating lanterns and designing Mosque, the Muslim holy place.
In cooking, we made vegetable samosas, a traditional treat shared during Iftar by Muslims. We applied lots of pre-learnt cooking skills to prepare our vegetables. We then boiled our potatoes and fried the onions. We then mashed the vegetables together, into a creamy consistency. The tricky part was folding the vegetables within the filo pastry, to make a perfect triangle.
This half term, our PE focus is Dance. On Thursday, we began exploring traditional movements inspired by British folk dance. We listened and responded to the music increasing and decreasing the speed in which we moved around the space. We worked individually, in pairs and then applied our movements in small and large groups.
Our dance theme linked perfectly to our celebration of National Dance Day. We joined with our Rushall Primary friends from Year 3 and Dragonflies class to learn some line dancing. We broke the four different movements down before linking them all together. Maybe you could listen along at home and perform our line dancing to your families.
A huge congratulations to Alfie, who is our ‘Champion of the Week’, for Fox class! Alfie impressed the adults during our English session. This week, we have been learning about poetry. The children created their own poems, linked to our topic ‘Food Glorious Food. Alfie shared such wonderful ideas during our group session and then he used these ideas to write his own version. Well done Alfie!
Our final community visit of the half term took us to Card Factory in Aldridge. We were looking for inspiration to use when designing and making our own Valentines cards in our art session.
As it was the week of love, we have been thinking about our special people and those that we love. Some of us thought of our special people at home and some of us thought about our friends and teachers, in school, that we love.
We used our cooking session, to bake a delicious treat to bring home for our Valentines. The children rolled and shaped dough, before adding sweet strawberry jam inside. From the messages in the home-school diaries, we think they went down a treat!
Harley-Jay has been awarded ‘Champion of the Week’ for Fox class. He has made fantastic progress with his reading. Harley-Jay is now reading with greater independence, applying his sound knowledge and beginning to recall information about what he has read, which is one of his targets. Well done Harley-Jay, you are a reading superstar!
Our week has been inspired by the ‘Kitchen Disco’ story, written by Clare Foges. If you want to listen at home, you can watch below.
On Monday, during our forest school session, we were left puzzle pieces that we had to locate around the woodland area. Once we had found them all and put the pieces together, we realised that it was linked to our next story. We enjoyed listening along and even having a little boogie.
It only seemed right to use some of the different fruits during our cooking and personal development sessions. We firstly designed our own fruit salad. We thought about the different fruits and our preferences to decide which fruits we would include. The following day, we referred back to our plans to prepare our fruits before organising them within our salads. We had to apply our chopping and peeling skills throughout.
In class, we have also been talking about the difference between food and drinks and how we categorise different foods and beverages. There were some that tricked us! We used this knowledge to make a fruity milkshake. Again, we used our fantastic chopping skills to prepare the strawberries before measuring ice cream and milk. We enjoyed watching the ingredients mix together in the very noisy blender!
On Friday, we celebrate NSPCC Number Day. We were invited to come to school dressed in our own number and shape clothes. The classroom was prepared with a range of maths related activities that tested our problem solving knowledge. There is a huge buzz about Maths in Fox class.
Champion Assembly was a little different, this week, as we moved to our new upper primary and secondary hall. We all enjoyed dancing and celebrating the successes of our peers, whilst exploring the new environment.
Khaled was our ‘Champion of the Week’, in Fox class. He has displayed such fantastic qualities of a kind and caring friend who is always looking to help those around him. In addition, Fox classroom can become very untidy when we are all engaged in our independent choice activities. Khaled is always the first to help tidy up and pack away the resources.
This week, we have become immersed in our Lunar New Year celebrations. On Wednesday we all engaged in a range of activities. We taste tested prawn crackers, spring rolls and egg fried rice. We read our fortunes, from our Chinese fortune cookies. We have also made and decorated our own Chinese lanterns and slithering snakes. We each were delivered a red envelope filled with a special golden coin – a common tradition.
Our cooking session, this week was also linked with our Chinese New Year celebrations. We applied our chopping, frying and boiling techniques to make our own quorn chow main. The smell from the cooking room was almost as good as it tasted – YUM!
We have continued our work, in art, studying our focus artist, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. This week, we used a range of materials, including buttons, feathers, pipe cleaners and pom poms to create self portraits. We thought carefully about the features we needed to include and where to position our materials.
We have been developing our relationships in class, during our PE sessions. This week we have created a range of partner balances. In order to be successful when balancing we have been trying extremely hard to remain still, point our fingers and toes. We have then added these balances to our gymnastic routines, now performed alongside a peer. Check the evidence for learning app to watch our routines!
