Welcome to Chestnut Class!
Miss Lloyd & Mrs Jones
I am so excited to get started and stuck in with lots of new learning, develop new skills and work with a variety of new children! Chestnut will have many opportunities for new friendship building, teamwork, independent opportunities and sharing their voice! So let's have an incredible year together! :)
Website will be updated weekly, every Friday, with pictures of our learning and any other exciting stuff we get up to!
Please Note: I will be deleting all updates every 2 weeks. This is to help ensure that accessing the website isn't too slow due to the amount of photos uploaded. So make sure you've caught up each week :)
Week 2
A very busy and exciting week with lots of new learning!
In English we discovered that we received a letter from the King in our story. It was stating how we must obey his rules with the banning of the dark. We therefore spent the week coming up with the reasons why we shouldn't ban the dark as we are going write him a letter back trying to convince him not to ban it. We did a conscience alley drama activity where Miss Lloyd pretended to be the king while everyone was stating the reason for and against his idea! We came up with lots of reasons for against!
In Maths we have been continuing to count in 2s, 5s and 10s and began to make and identify groups of numbers, in preparation for some children to start multiplication. We looked at making equal groups and then made specific amounts of groups, for example 2 groups of 5. We also looked at the adding number sentences for these groups (2 groups of 5- 5+5), as this will then help prepare for multiplication sentences next weekwith some children.
This week in Science we began our new topic of Plants. Our first lesson was observing different types of fruits and plants to see what they have within them to try and discover how they had grown. Where was the seed, what has it grown from?
We began in the classroom drawing up close different fruits and then went outside to observe some up close plants. We went into the corination garden for this. We discussed what differnt plants we found, some bumpy, some hairy, some with shapes we didn't notice from far away etc!
St George's Day
We had an excellent Thursday this week, celebrating St George's day! We learnt about who St George was and looked at the story of George and the dragon, retelling the story through drama. We also created our own dragon with a variety of characteristics!
To round off the celebrations, we had a parade (video below), with own own crafted shields and flags to wave about!
As part of our all about England day, we also learnt about some of the different landmarks in England. We played a match the name to landmark game and then chose our favourite landmark to write a mini poster about. We learnt about- The London Eye, Hadrian's Wall, The Eden Project, Stonehenge, The Roman Baths, Buckingham Palace, Durdle Door and Big Ben.
Retelling the story of George & the Dragon!
2/12
Looking at the different England landmarks
6/12
Made shields & flags!
10/12
Parade Time!
11/12
New Playground Equipment!
Summer 1 Week 1
The final term is upon us! Lots of exciting learning to come!
We have had a very exciting and busy first week back!
We started the week with beginning our new English story, starting with making predictions on what we thought the story was about. We were presented with a variety of clues. The thing that stood out to us the most was all the lights being switched off and a sign that read 'The dark is banned!' Along with this the clues included, a crown, a robe, a torch, a newspaper, candles and a picture of fireworks.
We made the prediction that the story could be about someone (a king?) banning the dark, to which we were correct as our new story is called The King who Banned the Dark.
In Maths, we started with a lesson on money, recognising different coins and understanding their value, using pre-money counters to help with this. We explored the colours, shapes and sizes of the coins and drew around them in our books. We then moved onto counting in 2s, 5s and 10s as when we get further into the money topic this will be very helpful for counting money.
We used a 100 square to help identify patterns when counting in 2s, 5s and 10s.
Winchester Science Centre!
We had a very exciting day the science centre, with a day packed full of activities! We started the day by getting to explore the centre, there was a ginormous guitar, a rocket, a screaming machine, a space area and so much more!
We then went to our 'Habitat Heroes' workshop where we were each in groups assigned an animal and we needed to think about where a good habitat would be fr our animal. We needed to consider what it would eat, where it would sleep and where it would be safe. After we did this, by exploring outside for good areas, we created our own habitat for our animal, thinking about what different features it would need.
We finished the day by visiting the Planetarium, we explored all the stars and planets in the sky and solar system, learning about each one, looking at what shapes we could make in the stars! It was magical and felt like we were actually in space!
In Art we began our new topic on 'Making Birds'. For our final outcome we will be sculpting our own birds but the first few lessons focus on drawing them. This week we did some observational drawing and drew different types of birds from pictures. We really focused on the detail of the birds, zooming in pictures to see every detail. This included adding fluffy feather, spikey hairs, bumpy beaks and wrinkly eyes. We wanted to come away from the birds looking too much like cartoons!
Knowledge Organisers
Please find below the knowledge organisers linked to your child's learning this term. This document provides details of the key knowledge the children are expected to learn across the sequence of learning. We would encourage parents and carers to look at these with their children and regularly spend time discussing the facts on the sheets.