Welcome to Chestnut Class!
Miss Lloyd, Miss Kirwin & 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 7
Happy Half Term!!!
We made it! I hope you all enjoy a well deserved break before a very busy (& Christmassy :D) second half term! See you soon!
This week in English, we focused on animal fact files! We all researched an animal and wrote a fact file before then writing some animal descriptive sentences. The year 2s included this in their story as the research part of it! It was very fun researching lots of different animals and learning some new facts.
In Maths, we focused on teen numbers this week. We looked at how we partition these numbers, beginning to look at the tens and the ones and understanding what this means. The year 1s also continued to compare numbers with greater than, less than and equal too. We used rekenreks to show these comparisons. Year 2s continued to flexibly partition different numbers, this week focusing on 10, thinking about our bonds and the different number sentences these can be put into (addiiton and subtraction).
Choose and learn time this week:
I unfortunately didn't get loads of pictures this week, but the children are really getting stuck in with their independent activities. So many children this week completed their learning passport which was amazing! They have already come such a long way since the beginning of the year.
Our writing activity focus was on animal research and adjectives to describe animals. In our creative area we made Trinidad carnival masks and on our outside tuff spot we made balanced diet shopping baskets!
Fact file writing!
1/5
Trinidad carnival masks!
2/5
Trinidad carnival masks!
3/5
Trinidad carnival masks!
4/5
Trinidad carnival masks!
5/5
This week was our very first Open Classroom! Parents were invited to come in and see some of our learning in Science and Geography by looking through books and viewing photos of the hands-on activities we have been enjoying. If you were not able to make it, here are some snapshots of what we've been getting up to this half term.
Week 6
In English this week read a new story 'The Enormous Turnip'. We began by reading the story and then had a go at doing some drama to act out the key moments of the story. We pretended that we had just grown an 'enormous' turnip, thinking about how big and heavy it would be to carry! The year 1s wrote some sentences to go with their drawn, describing what it was like to grow this turnip! We ensured to use the word 'enormous' in our writing when describing the turnips size!
The year 2s began to plan and write their friendship narrative based on our main English text 'Leo and the Octopus'. They came up with a setting for their story and 2 characters (a child and an animal.)
In Maths this week we focused on the partitioning of numbers in different ways and being able to compare different amounts using the language greater than and less than. We used numicon and rekenreks to show the different ways numbers can be partitioned, identifying patterns within odd and even numbers.
In Geography this week, we compared our local village and community of Harting with the community of Trinidad in South America. We looked closely at photographs of Trinidad and discussed the similarities and differences we noticed. The children identified features such as sandy beaches, colourful houses, warmer weather, palm trees and a variety of wildlife that are different from those found in Harting. We then read a story about a girl moving from Trinidad to England and used the events and settings in the story to make further comparisons between the two communities.
In Art over the past two weeks, we have continued our role as collectors and explorers while creating our main artwork for this half term. The children carefully collected leaves from outside and observed them closely, drawing them in as much detail as possible using metallic crayons to capture their shape, patterns and textures. This week, they developed their artwork further by painting over their leaf drawings with Brusho paints, experimenting with colour and creating vibrant, eye-catching effects.
Choose & learn time this week:
The children this week were given for the first time their 'learning passports' where they have the opportunity to earn stamps for completing activities in the different areas across the classroom. This has encouraged the children to choose from a variety of activities in their choose and learn time and they've loved it! (Apologies however for the lack of photos on this this week!)