A week of curiosity, cooking, and creativity

This weeks learning was a wonderful mix of cooking, healthy living, maths skills, and storytelling — all helping to build independence, understanding, and imagination

🥔 Cooking: Jacket Potatoes with Beans and Cheese

We began by preparing a simple and comforting meal: jacket potatoes with beans and cheese.

First, we washed and dried the potatoes before placing them in the oven to bake. As they cooked, the kitchen filled with a warm, earthy smell. Once soft inside, we carefully cut them open and watched the steam escape!

Next came the toppings — baked beans and grated cheese. The heat from the potato melted the cheese into a golden layer over the beans, making it both delicious and satisfying.

This activity helped develop:

• Fine motor skills (grating cheese, cutting safely)
• Independence and confidence in the kitchen
• An understanding of where food comes from

🥗 Understanding Healthy Food

While cooking, we talked about healthy eating choices.

We explored how our meal included:

• Potatoes → a source of energy (carbohydrates)
• Beans → protein for growth
• Cheese → calcium for strong bones

We also discussed the importance of:

• Eating a balanced diet
• Including fruits and vegetables
• Drinking water

By connecting cooking with nutrition, learners begin to understand how food helps keep our bodies strong and healthy.

We continued this through the week and sampled lots of different healthy foods.

Exploring Pictograms in Maths

A fun step into data and discovery

This week in maths, we explored an exciting way to collect and present information using pictograms. The children were enthusiastic and quickly engaged with this visual approach to learning numbers and data.

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🖼️ What is a Pictogram?

We began by learning that a pictogram is a type of chart that uses pictures or symbols to represent data. Each picture stands for a certain number of items, making it easier to count and compare.

For example:
🍎 = 1 apple
or sometimes
🍎 = 2 apples

This introduced the idea that symbols can represent more than one item, depending on the key.

📖 Story Time: Tiddler by Julia Donaldson

Exploring imagination and storytelling

This week, we enjoyed reading the delightful story Tiddler by Julia Donaldson, a tale full of imagination, creativity, and adventure under the sea.

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🐟 About the Story

Tiddler tells the story of a small fish who is always late for school because he creates fantastical excuses about his journeys. Each day, he arrives with a new and dramatic tale, describing adventures such as meeting sea creatures or travelling through underwater worlds.

Although his stories are not true, they spark curiosity and excitement among the other sea creatures.

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💬 Our Discussions

After reading the story, we talked about:

• Imagination vs reality – What parts of Tiddler’s stories were real or made up?
• Honesty – Why is it important to tell the truth?
• Storytelling – How stories can be fun and creative

The children loved sharing their thoughts and even came up with their own imaginative ideas.

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✨ What We Learned

Through Tiddler, we explored important skills and themes:

• Creative thinking – imagining new and exciting ideas
• Listening and speaking – sharing opinions about the story
• Sequencing events – remembering what happened first, next, and last
• Understanding consequences – learning that honesty matters

🌊 A Special Birthday and a Big Mission: Celebrating David Attenborough at 100

Today marks an incredible milestone — Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday. For decades, he has inspired people of all ages to explore, understand, and protect the natural world. From deep oceans to towering rainforests, his voice has guided us through the wonders of life on Earth, reminding us how important it is to care for our planet.

Reaching 100 years is an amazing achievement, but what makes Sir David truly special is how he has used his life to make a difference. Even in his later years, he continues to speak out about climate change, biodiversity loss, and especially the importance of protecting our oceans. His documentaries have shown us both the beauty of marine life and the dangers caused by pollution — particularly plastic waste.

🌍 Learning from Sir David: Taking Action

To celebrate his birthday in a meaningful way, we took part in an activity inspired by his work: practising cleaning the ocean.

Since we can’t all travel to the sea, we recreated the challenge in a fun and thoughtful way:

• We looked at images and videos showing ocean pollution.
• We discussed how rubbish, especially plastic, harms sea creatures like turtles, fish, and seabirds.
• Then, we carried out a hands-on activity where we “cleaned” a model ocean.

🧪 Our Ocean Clean-Up Activity

We used a container of water to represent the ocean and added different materials such as:

• Paper scraps (to represent floating waste)
• Small plastic items (to represent pollution)
• Natural materials like leaves and pebbles

Using tools like spoons, nets, and tweezers, we worked carefully to remove the “pollution” without disturbing the “marine life.” This helped us understand how difficult it can be to clean the ocean in real life — and why it’s so important to prevent pollution in the first place.

💡 What We Learned

This activity helped us reflect on a few key ideas:

• Prevention is better than cure — stopping pollution from entering the ocean is easier than removing it.
• Every small action counts — recycling, reducing plastic use, and picking up litter can make a big difference.
• We all share responsibility — protecting the planet is something everyone can help with.

🎉 A Meaningful Celebration

Celebrating David Attenborough’s 100th birthday in this way felt important. Instead of just recognising his achievements, we honoured his legacy by taking action ourselves. He has spent a lifetime showing us the beauty of nature — now it is up to us to protect it.

As Sir David himself has often reminded us, “The future of the natural world is in our hands.”

Let this special birthday inspire us all to continue caring for our oceans, our wildlife, and our planet — not just today, but every day. 🌱

This week has been full of exciting learning opportunities across PE, Art and Swimming, with pupils showing enthusiasm, creativity and growing confidence in every session.

Gymnastics in PE – Balancing Skills 🤸‍♀️

In PE, the children have been developing their gymnastics balancing skills. They explored different types of balances, using both large and small body parts, and practised holding their positions with control and stability. The pupils worked hard to improve their posture, strength and coordination, and many were able to link balances together into simple sequences. It was wonderful to see their focus, perseverance and encouragement of one another as they challenged themselves to try new movements.

Art Outdoors – Creating a Bug Hotel 🐞🎨

Our Art lesson took us outside, where the children used natural and recycled materials to create a bug hotel. They learned about the importance of insects and how habitats help protect wildlife. Pupils worked collaboratively to design and build structures that would provide shelter for different bugs. This activity sparked fantastic discussions about nature, sustainability and caring for the environment, while allowing the children to express their creativity in a hands-on way.

Swimming – Building Confidence in the Water 🏊‍♂️

In swimming, the children continued to develop their water confidence and swimming skills. They practised safe entry and exit techniques, floating, and basic swimming movements. Many pupils showed great progress, becoming more confident and comfortable in the water, while listening carefully to instructions and following pool safety rules. Their positive attitudes and determination were clear to see.

Overall, it has been a fantastic week of active, creative and practical learning. Well done to everyone for their hard work and brilliant attitudes—we are very proud of you! 🌈👏

Champions of the Week! Well done to our Champion this week for excellent counting skills.

This week has been full of exciting opportunities for hands‑on learning, with students developing key skills across literacy, science and physical development. Through purposeful play and exploration, the class has been busy strengthening name‑writing skills, investigating waterproof materials, and building confidence in the water during swimming sessions.

Developing Name Writing Skills

Supporting students with name writing is an important step in building early literacy and self‑confidence. Throughout the week, students were encouraged to recognise and write their own names using a variety of fun, tactile approaches. These included writing in sand, using whiteboards and pens, forming letters with playdough, and tracing over their names in different colours.

We focused on helping them understand that their name has meaning and belongs to them. Some practised writing the first letter of their name, while others progressed to writing their full name independently. Staff provided gentle encouragement and modelled correct letter formation, celebrating effort just as much as the finished result.

Exploring Waterproof Materials

Our curiosity area transformed into a mini science lab as we explored the question: “Which materials are waterproof?” Using a selection of everyday objects such as paper, fabric, plastic, foil, and sponge, students made predictions before testing them with water.

The students enjoyed pouring, splashing and observing what happened to each material. Together, we talked about what “waterproof” means and why some materials soak up water while others repel it. Adults supported learning by introducing new vocabulary such as absorb, soak, float, and dry.

This activity encouraged critical thinking and problem‑solving, while also linking to real‑life experiences such as wearing coats in the rain or choosing the right materials for swimming bags. We all were very engaged and keen to share their discoveries with friends.

Building Confidence Through Swimming

Swimming sessions continued to be a highlight of the week. Swimming plays a vital role in supporting children’s physical development, coordination and water confidence. The focus was on developing basic water skills such as entering and exiting the pool safely, blowing bubbles, floating, and moving through the water with support.

For some , this was about overcoming initial nerves and building trust, while others worked on refining their skills and gaining independence. The sessions promoted resilience, listening skills, and confidence, all within a fun and supportive environment.

Importantly, swimming also links to personal safety and wellbeing, helping us understand how to behave responsibly around water.

Congratulations to our two champions this week

We’ve had an amazing but very busy week back at school. We started the week looking at job roles and this week, it was cooks and chefs. We had great fun making fruit skewers and practiced our chopping skills.

Our new topic is Exploring Our Waters. In Science we have investigated what floats and sinks. We used all different items around the classroom and sometimes made predictions on what floats and sinks.

We finished the week swimming at Oak Park and Sycamore were absolutely fantastic.

We had such fun in our Easter PACT session. We started with an Easter egg hunt and found lots of chocolate hidden in the forest. We also had great fun in our sensory Easter Tuff tray and also making Easter decorations. Thank you for all those that attended.

We have been also incredibly busy making our Spring enterprise items. I must say so far they are looking eggsellent!

I have to finish this weeks blog by telling you all how amazing they were making pizzas! We all tried hard to be super independent and definitely enjoyed tasting them after.

Well done for our champion of the week, for excellent work in phonics. Have a great week! Love Lizzie and the Sycamore Team.

We started the week with a fantastic dough disco session which supports us with our fine motor skills, our favourite song is definitely “baby shark”.

We had a great time testing gravity in science. We explored dropping different items to see which made the biggest splash.

We are doing fantastic progress with our rocket sculptures in Art!

Well Done to our champion this week for being incredibly helpful!

Have a great weekend

We had a fantastic world book day, we all had some fantastic costumes! We loved the story room on the broom and made some fantastic wands to use.

We also made some fantastic prints using different natural resources to create artwork.

Our champions of the week has done excellent phonic work and is trying super hard with his sounds! Well done

We started the week practicing our self care skills! We have all become fantastic at washing our faces, brushing our teeth, brushing our hair and even cleaning our nails with a nail brush. Everyone is making fantastic progress in their independence, well done Sycamore!

We are continuing to work on expressing our emotions. This week we have practiced what we like and do not in music. We have listened to different genres of music and made clear choices of our preferences.

We continued with our sensory stories, this week it was about exploring space. We have felt the vibrations of the rocket, experienced floating with no gravity, experienced making the earth spin and lots of sensory fun! We all love a sensory story and it gives us better understanding of what is happening in the story.

In Science we have made our own rockets fly. We made paper rockets and attached them to straws and made them fly all across the classroom.

Well Done for fantastic communication and becoming one of our champions this week!

And another massive well done for our other champion this week! She has been working super hard on her writing and making amazing progress!

We have had a very space themed week in Sycamore and we have really enjoyed lots of sensory but fun lessons!

We started the week testing all the materials we could make fly like our rockets, we blew up balloons and let them go, used our foot pump rocket and finished with a flying tissue paper with the hairdryer. We had lots of fun but made the class very messy!!!

This was one of our favourite days, we celebrated national chocolate fondue day! I can confirm it was definitely a hit and sure they will want to celebrate it every year!

We are continuing working on our fine motor control and enjoy time working with play-doh using all the different tools to strengthen our hands and control to support with our writing.

Sycamore class continues to shine in their cooking lessons and becoming more independent as the weeks go on. This week we had fantastic fun making super noodles and can confirm they were super tasty!

So I love a sensory story, Sycamore over the last few weeks have been introduced to my storytelling. They have been superstars and really taken an active part in all my stories.

Thank you for a fantastic week Sycamore,