At the start of the week we had our EYFS Graduation Ceremony. We sang 3 songs so beautifully and each came on stage to receive our graduation certificate from Mrs Ross.
What a wonderful end to a wonderful year! This week in Donaldson class we have been learning about the life cycle of a butterfly. We have been watching some caterpillars grow from tiny babies to big adults. Once they were nice and big they tucked themselves away into a chrysalis! They have been in their chrysalides for 5 days now. We sang them our Butterfly Song to help encourage them along. Maybe after the weekend we will return to school to find some butterflies!
The children have been enjoying drawing 'maths stories' on their whiteboard this week. We are learning to draw what happens 'first, then, now' stories to help us find the answer (E.g First there were 5 cookies, then Miss ate 2, now there are 3 cookies.) We then had a problem solving challenge. We talked about the number of legs a dog has and the number of legs a person has. We told the children we had a boat with 4 legs on it! We thought about the different things that could be on a boat. (Either 2 people or 1 dog) We then imagined there were 6 legs. We thought we could be 1 dog and 1 person, or 3 people on the boat.
We then challenged the children to show us how many people could be on the boat if there were 8 legs. The children all produced great work to show a possible answer. Well done everyone! The theme of this year’s Science Week was ‘Connecting to our planet – making plastic pollution a thing of the past’
In Reception we read the story ‘Clean Up’ and ‘Under the Sea Cleaning Spree’. We sadly learnt that a lot of rubbish is ending up on beaches and in oceans across the world. It made us sad to think that this rubbish was making sea creatures poorly. We spent a lot of time discussing how we could help the world’s beaches and oceans. We learnt the importance of recycling our plastics to reduce the use of plastic and how we could each help tidy up our local beach at Felixstowe. We know that it is very important we never drop our rubbish, we always find a bin or take it back home to put in a bin. In Literacy we wrote a pledge- a small thing they can do to help us protect the planet. Mrs Kerr and Mrs Campbell were very impressed with our excellent writing skills. We used capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. We used our fine motor skills to pick up rubbish from our beach and ocean tuff tray. Although we feel very sad to learn that the oceans are becoming polluted, we had a fascinating week learning how we can all help to protect our planet. On Wednesday afternoon, kitted out in red, white and blue and even some of our own Kings and Queens, the whole school joined together to celebrate the forthcoming King's Coronation by having a party on the field. We made bunting, had a picnic with some yummy food, played different games and sung our coronation song which we had all been learning. We all had a wonderful afternoon celebrating together.
We have had a wonderful start to our summer term in YR and the children have settled back into our school routine really well. It is hard to believe that this is their final term in Reception.
We began the week with reading the story ‘The Tiny Seed’ by Eric Carle. We wrote sentences about the story and produced some impressive work using capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. On Wednesday we looked very closely at some beautiful daffodils and used our fantastic painting skills to paint them. During our Outdoor Explorers session we went on a hunt for signs of spring. We spotted new buds on trees, tree blossom, butterflies, seedlings, daffodils and lots and lots of bees. We were very interested in the bees in particular so we watched a video on how bees make their honey and Mr Child’s kindly lent us his bee keeper outfit to have a look at. We finished the week with a yummy snack of honey on pancakes! There was lots of excitement in class this morning when Mrs Ross came to tell us that she had found something strange out in our garden as she was securing the site! The children followed her to discover that a spacecraft had crash landed in our garden. The children went out to investigate and hunt for clues! They discovered screws and some loose parts of the space ship and decided that it must have crashed. We found an invitation tucked nearby the space craft to someone called Zom who had been invited to a dinner on Mars. We found some purple footprints and decided that Zom must have left the space ship and run away.
The children decided we needed to help Zom get to his dinner party so we set to work making some rockets for him. We also made some paintings of what we imagined Zom might look like and wrote descriptions so that we could keep on the look out for the creature! We have been learning about space this week and the children were very interested in what it would be like to an astronaut.
We learnt about how eating food is very different when you are in space. We watched a video of Tim Peake showing how he prepared food in the space station. We learnt that food in often dehydrated (the water is removed) so that it is lighter. We also learnt that food has to be eaten from special sealed containers or bags so it doesn't float away when there is no gravity. This would make a big mess and could also be dangerous if crumbs or liquid got into the equipment. We had a go at making our own space dessert by rehydrating some powdered dessert and then ate it from our special space packaging. We talked about the way that water would have to be carefully added to the packet of food using a special machine and tubing. The children loved their space dessert and were having some great conversations about how different life would be living on the space station. We had a wonderful day celebrating World Book Day in Donaldson class today. We have read and shared so many brilliant books. We have made Gruffalo Cupcakes, been on a bear hunt AND had a guest teacher come and read to us! What a super day to celebrate our love of books.
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AuthorWritten by Mrs Campbell & Archives
January 2024
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