We have been practising saying "Good afternoon" in Spanish and have been learning to answer the register with "buenas tardes."

Our new challenge is to learn the word for the next month of March which is "Marzo."
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 Today the Rainbows had so much fun dressing up as their favourite historical character and sharing facts about them. We learnt that people in the past changed our world so we can have the life we had today. We talked about lots of interesting things including women's rights, technology and medicines.

Some of the inspirational figures we chose to teach our friends about were Emmeline Pankhurst, Neil Armstrong, Charles Dickens, Marie Curie, Edward Jenner, Andy Warhol, Cleopatra, Tutankhamun and medieval kings including Henry VIII.

Miss Clementson came as Amy Johnson (the first female aviator to fly solo from London to Australia) Miss Hanson came as Katherine Switzer (the first woman to run the Boson marathon) and Miss Hodgson came as the singer Prince.

The Rainbows were really keen to learn about these inspirational figures and asked lots of questions to find out more. The were puzzled to hear that women were not always able to do the same things as men and said how unfair it was. We learnt lots of new words including "suffragette" "evacuee" "vaccine" and "medieval."

We awarded two certificates, one for the best and most accurate costume, and one for the person who was most interesting to learn about and had the most interesting facts. Well done to one of our Emmeline Pankhurst's and also to one of our Neil Armstrong's!
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Here are some of our inspirational figures. See if you can guess who we are!

What an amazing day the Rainbows have had to finish our "Magical Storyland" topic! We have had several surprises throughout the day with adults from different classes coming to read us their favourite story! We listened to "Tiddler" from Miss McGinnes, "Room on the Broom" from Mrs Jones, "The Three Little Pigs" from Mrs Greenhalge (with a very special reader) and Mrs Clarke read her favourite story too! It was lovely to meet adults we perhaps hadn't seen around school before.

We brought our favourite books to read at school and shared them with our friends. We enjoyed reading to them and talking about our favourite parts.

We also coloured some book marks just in case we don't finish our bedtime story at home and need to remember the page. You can see our neat colouring below!

In the afternoon we had some relaxing time to support our mental health and enjoy the end of our special day with a story. We snuggled up with a hot chocolate in our PJ's and listened carefully. What a lovely end to such a fun topic this half term!

Rainbows LOVE reading!

This week we have been learning that it is just as important to look after our brain that it is to look after our body. It is easy to see when we have a cold or are being sick, but it is hard to see when our brain needs to be looked after.

Our activities to promote good mental wellbeing have included making a paper chain decorated with all the things that make us happy. We each made one loop and connected them together to show we are a team and help each other. We know we can ask for help when we need it, and can offer help if we see others who need it.

We also learnt about different emotions. We could identify happy, sad, angry, calm, scared, frightened, surprised, excited, tired, worried, proud, silly and terrified. We could show these emotions using our body and face and describe them to a friend. We coloured emotions monsters and painted them to show how we were feeling and created our own monsters. We carefully painted or drew what we know the facial expressions look like. We learnt which colours meant sad, angry and happy. We know we can feel lots of emotions at the same time and can turn to others to help change our negative emotions to positive ones.

We began to learn "Count on Me" by Bruno Mars with the accompanying Makaton signs which sings about friendship and caring for others.

To support our mental health we took part in some yoga activities from Cosmic Yoga! We took part in relaxation activities, a positive affirmation activity and a movement activity to help our mental health.

Our topic this week has been The Princess and the Frog! We enjoyed listening to the story and know that you need to keep to your word so people trust you. We know trust is important!

We decorated crowns this week and designed what we wanted them to look like. It was tricky to make our decorations stick so we had to think carefully about how we connected the pieces. In our role play area we have been dressing up as fairy tale characters and using our imagination to retell stories and make up our own. We wrote comments about the story on paper hearts practising our Fred Talk skills.

During outdoor learning we have been learning to persevere! We are really proud of our friends as we have been trying activities that we find tricky. Some of us have found climbing to the top of the climbing frame tricky and have learnt to do that this week by being brave! Others have learnt to hoola-hoop by trying and trying and can now do this! We are proud of our friends.

Some of us have been practising team work skills in the sand to dig the biggest hole, and some of us enjoyed exploring shadows! In the mud kitchen some of us chose to make buns and cakes and cooked them carefully in the oven before serving them to our teachers and friends. One of the rainbows even made a fairy house in the sand so the fairies could keep warm in the cold weather! Some of us chose to explore sound in the music area by finding different ways to move the equipment. 

Here are some photos of our indoor and outdoor learning.

This week the Rainbows have been learning how important portion control is. We know that it is important because we need to look after our body and have a healthy, balanced diet. 

At dinner time we have been accessing the salad bar ourselves and being mindful to choose an appropriate amount of food. We also know that we should not waste food.

​Here we are choosing appropriate portions to eat alongside our dinner!

Today we had another visit from Reverend John and Lay Minister Stephanie Peake from St Mary's Church. Both read their favourite parts from the bible to us and explained they meant a lot and were very special to them.

The Rainbows were very lucky to each be presented with a children's copy of the bible to keep at home and read with their family.

During their visit we sung "He's got the Whole World" which we have been practising. Reverend John was very impressed! We are looking forward to learning with the Reverend and Lay Minister as Easter approaches.

Rainbows had the opportunity to share their favourite number with the class today, and to explain why it is their favourite number.

Here are some of their comments; 
"My favourite number is 5 because I’m 5!" "Number 1 is my favourite because it is the first number., "I like 5 and 4," "I like 100 becuase it a big number," "I like 9 'cos it's in between 8 and 10," "My favourite is 19 because it's my birthday!" 

We also looked at the different styles of numbers and one of the comments was "Those numbers look like numbers on a timer," so we talked about digital time.

We also made number machines. After we created them, we spoke out the function of our machine and practised using them. Some of the machines found how many altogether and some were counting machines. We used lots of mathematical vocabulary including "add," "plus," and "how many altogether."

Our topic this week has been Jack and the Beanstalk. We read several versions of the story and discussed if we think the characters are good or bad. We decided that even though we normally think giants are bad, that in fact Jack was bad because he broke into the castle, went inside a strangers house and stole from him! Then he hurt the giant at the end of the story!

Our activities this week have included cutting curved lines to make a beanstalk, building a beanstalk from the floor with construction blocks and building a castle on top of the table, then retelling the story with puppets, painting our favourite part of the story by mixing colours, writing about our favourite part of the story and matching beans/coins to the correct numeral and ordering them.

We have been practising being safe and carrying scissors to our seats correctly as well and lots of us have been showing adults how we can do this independently!

In maths this week we have been learning the difference between "more than" and "fewer than." We have been learning to identify which groups of objects have more and fewer than in, and that it doesn't matter what size or colour the objects are.

Some of us have continued to learn two numbers that make 5, and have been singing "Five Little Speckled Frogs" to help us.

​One of the Rainbows also read our class a story this week at story time! We are so proud they achieved this and loved listening to him!

Here are some of our activities! 

Today was a VERY windy day so we did some impromptu learning! We decided to make kites to see how they react to the wind and how they move. First we decorated our kite, next we cut it out, then put some tape on it to strengthen it, used the hole punch to make a hole and finally tied some string to hold onto. 

We took our kites outside and watched them fly in the wind. We learnt that when the wind was stronger or when a gust came our kites would get higher and fly further away from us. When the wind got weaker the kites floated nearer us and towards the ground. We had so much fun!

Some of us made dancing sticks with straws and tissue paper and watched how they changed in the wind, and some of us had a great idea to make some flags to fly!

We were also learning about Jack and the Beanstalk today. We talked about how windy it must be high in the sky as the clouds were moving very fast! We decided that the beanstalk would be swaying lots and would be too dangerous for Jack to climb. We tried listening for the giants footsteps in the clouds but it was too windy to hear anything!

Some of the comments were "It is getting darker and windier," "The clouds are silver," "It's too windy to hear the giants footsteps," "It's started to rain," "My kite was flying!" "My kite got stuck (in the climbing frame) 'cos its windy!" "The clouds were moving fast!" "The kite blew up!" and "The kite went high!"