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 busy and fun week with a range of different activities!
In English this week, we were doing lots of general sentence writing practice, with an emphasis on adjectives and expanded noun phrases! We looked at what a noun was and practiced describing different nouns with adjectives and expanded noun phrases, as well as different grammar techniques.
We had World Book Day on Thursday where we spent the day looking at lots of different books and just enjoying different stories. We applied our knowledge on adjectives to a description activity about a book character. We watched a draw along lesson and then described the character with adjectives!
We also read one of this years world book day books- 'The Big Bang' which was about 3 cats in a thunderstorm, and focused on the emotions and weather parts of the story. We spoke about how we feel where their is thunder and lighting , and the importance of bravery- linking it to our own experiences of being brave. We then designed our own weather scene for the cats!
In Maths we have been focusing on subtracting and using related facts to subtract, for example 6-2=4 so 60-20=40. This has helped us to understand subtracting tens numbers easily, using information we already know. We have learnt that when you subtract tens numbers (eg, 10, 20 40) the ones part of the number never changes but the tens does. This has helped when it has been to subtract larger numbers.
On Monday we very excitingly got to learn about and have our own mini St David's Day celebrations as St David's day was on Sunday. We discussed that each country has their own special day to celebrate a saint who did something wonderful and important for their country. We learnt that St David spread Christianity all around Wales, performing miracles and helping others.
To celebrate the day, we looked at some videos of the Welsh parades , traditional dressing up, discussed the meaning of daffodils and leeks in Wales and were able to partake in some Welsh traditions- We listened to the Welsh national anthem and learnt some Welsh ourselves- 'Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!' (Happy St David's Day).
Very conveniently, Miss Lloyd had visited Wales at the weekend and brought back some Welsh cakes for the class to try as this was another way to celebrate! We loved the Welsh cakes, they were delicious! We loved celebrating St David's Day!
Our Science topic this half term we are looking at habitats and specifically- food chains. Over the last couple of weeks we have been exploring outside to see what evidence we could find of a food chain. We biggest one we discovered were nibbled leaves. We were able to work out that a bug like a caterpillar would have nibbled the leaves so then thought about what would then eat the caterpillar (a bird). Through this discussion we then created a food chain! We then discussed any other food chain we might know about- ones we wouldn't find in the playgrounf, for example grass - deer - lion.
Spring 2 Week 1
Halfway through the school year and we are ready to crack on with lots of new learning this half term
We have already got started with our new book in English, starting by making predictions on what we thought the story might be about! We had a variety of clues and pictures from the story, which helped us with our predictions! Once our new story was revealed (The Flower Block), we read it and started writing! We had a go with some vocabulary sentences and a simile poem about the flowers!
In Maths, we have begun some new work on addition and subtraction number sentences, specifically looking at subtracting sentences this half term. We focused this week on using a number line to count backwards from a number.
We began our new Geography topic this week, learning all about the United Kingdom. We this week focused on the 4 countries that make up the United Kingdom and were able to label them on a map.
To help us identify these 4 countries we were introduced to 4 friends! George from England , Andrew from Scotland, Patrick from Northern Ireland and David from Wales. We discussed that each country had their own special day based on a saint who did important things for the country (hence the names!) As it is St David's Day (Wales) this Sunday, we will have some ST David's day celebrations next week!
In DT we started our new topic of levers and sliders. We spent this weeks lesson just exploring books with different levers and sliders in them, looking at what they do and how they move. We looked at the key words lever, slider and pivot, exploring what they mean and labeling the books with these words. We also had a hunt around the school looking for any of the mechanisms and identified where the pivot was.
Over the half term we left out our Bog Baby habitats to see if we would have any visitors and we did! We couldn't believe that our Bog Babies had come to visit!
Our teachers reading at snack time today! :)
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.