What an amazing and busy first week back we have had! Our theme this week was 'pets'. We started the week listening carefully to the story ‘Tabby McTat’ by Julia Donaldson. We explored what animals we could own as pets such as cats, dogs, rabbits, lizard, tortoise, horse, guinea pig, hamster, snake, fish and chickens! We discussed what we need to do to care for a pet and concluded that pets need a loving home, a space safe to live, water and appropriate food – we spoke about how certain foods can make animals poorly.

A group of us worked with Mrs Stevens to make play-dough. We carefully measured out the ingredients and practised our turn-taking!

In provision, children have had the opportunity to draw a picture about a pet they have at home and we have been writing sentences about our pets! If we don’t have a pet at home, we have been writing about what pet we would like. Children have been completing graphs to show what their friends favourite pet is out of a dog, cat, rabbit, fish and bird! Can your child tell you what their friends favourite pet was? Some Reception children worked as a team to order the Numicon pieces 1-10 - discussing what one more than their current number was - it was so lovely to see the children choosing to practise what we have been covering in our Maths lessons. We have been practising our carefully colouring and cutting to make our own split pin pets and we have been using the 'How to Draw' sheets to develop our drawing skills!

In Literacy, Year 1’s text driver for this half-term is “Where the Wild Things Are”. We started the week listening carefully to the story and answering questions about it. Children have moved onto the ‘acquire’ stage of our unit where we are learning about adding the suffix ‘ed’ to given words and using these words in sentences.

In Maths, Reception children have focused on ordering numbers to 8 and using the stem sentence ‘X is more than___”. We have used the 5 and a bit structure to represent 8 as 5 and 3 more and we have used the NumberBlocks episode ‘Peekaboo’ to help us reason about which numbers are ‘more than’ and ‘less than’ others. Year 1 children have explored partitioning numbers 6 to 10 using the part-whole model representations and have begun work on systematically partitioning numbers 6 to 10.
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In Science, we have begun to describe materials using key property vocabulary - hard/soft, stretchy/stiff, shiny/dull, rough/smooth, bendy/rigid, waterproof/not waterproof, absorbent/not absorbent and opaque/transparent.

Team EO had lots of fun dressing up as their chosen inspirational figure and sharing lots of interesting facts about them!

Some of our inspirational figures included Florence Nightingale, Edith Cavell, Geoff Hurst, Dr Alex Fleming, Neil Armstrong, Cleo Patra, Pablo Picasso, Pele and Anne Frank! 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 Cleo Patra and Dr Alex Fleming!

​Here are some of our inspirational figures and our interesting facts! 

Welcome back to the second half of the Spring term in Team EO. We hope you all had a lovely holiday and are ready for an exciting and busy half-term ahead! 

This half-term our topic focus is 'Amazing Animals'! We will be exploring different types of animals and their habitats and we will also  be discussing the needs of the animals.

Our core book for this half-term is "The Tale of the Naughty Little Rabbit". 

 Team EO have had a wonderful day to end learning on our 'Magical Storyland' topic. We had lots of book fun and there was lots of talk about reading and relaxing!

Children were invited to wear their pyjamas to school and bring a bedtime book - some children also brought in their teddy bears! 

We enjoyed listening to stories from various member of staff including Miss McGinnes, Miss Crookes and Miss Hodgson. Miss McGinnes read 'Tiddler', Miss Crookes read 'The Worrysaurus' and Miss Hodgson read 'Stickman'. Miss Overton shared various books with the children including 'The Night Pirates' and 'Beware of the Bears'. 

To start our afternoon, the children participated in yoga, we spoke about how this was good for our mental health and how it helped us to relax. We then created a bedtime atmosphere by turning the lights off and shutting the blinds before snuggling up on the carpet to share our books from home with our friends. We enjoyed listening to adults read with a hot chocolate and biscuit! 

Our story of the week was ‘Cinderella’. We carefully thought about the characteristics of a fairy tale – we know that it has a good character, a bad character, some magic and a happy ending! We then thought about what we would wish for if we had a fairy Godmother and one of our activities in the writing area this week has been to write our wishes in a thought bubble. Children have also had the opportunity to write their own invitations for a party and have been giving them out to their friends. Our provision maths activity has been to read the numeral on the wand and put the correct number of beads on the wand. In the creative area we have had the opportunity to create our own wands and shields. In the construction area we had ‘fairy tale themed copy the building brick model’ challenge cards and we have had some amazing models built! After we have been our models we have been making labels and captions to tell others what our models are.

This week was Children’s Mental Health week – this years’ theme was ‘Let’s Connect’. We started off by discussing what mental health is. We learn that it is all about how we are feeling, the thoughts we are having, how this affects the choices we make and how we behave. It is also how we are able to cope with what is happening in our daily lives. We then moved onto explore connections and discussed with our friends who we had connections (relationships) with. Children were able to identify that they have connections with parents, grandparents, siblings and friends! We spoke about how these connections make us feel. We then made a class paperchain that is going to be joined to every other classes to show our connection as a school!

In Maths, Reception children have focused on counting, ordinality and cardinality. We have verbally been counting to 30 placing emphasis on “1’s” past 20. While working with numbers to 10 we have continued to develop our understanding of the ordinal aspect by consolidating our understanding that each number has a value of ‘1 more’ than the previous number. 
Year 1 children have been consolidating their learning on the positioning of numbers to 10 and estimating where they lie on a number line. They have learnt what odd and even numbers are and the difference between them and we have learnt that an even number can be partitioned into either 2 even number or 2 odd numbers and that an odd number can only be partitioned an odd and even number.

In Literacy, Year 1’s have worked hard to produce a description of the top of the beanstalk! Children worked hard to orally compose and hold their sentence, use capital letters, finger spaces and full stop and use the conjunction ‘and’ within their work.

On Thursday, linking to our History learning and fairy tale themed week, we learnt what ‘armour’ is. We know that armour is a special suit made from metal that knights wear to protect themselves and that it is very heavy! We learnt the names of the following parts – helmet, throat guard, shoulder guard, breast plate, chainmail, guantlets, cuisses, leg plates, sword and shield. This inspired some of us to create our own shields and swords!

In Literacy, Year 1 have been writing setting descriptions and working hard to use the conjunction ‘and’ to join two sentences together.

In Maths, Reception children have been learning about height and length. To compare length we drew around our feet to create paper footprints and then found items in our classroom that were longer and shorter than our footprint!
Year 1 have started work on ‘Numbers 0-10’. Children have been counting objects and matching the spoken number to the written numeral and number name and they have been working hard to understand the concept of ‘5 and a bit’ – we have used the part-whole model to support this. We have also looked at finding one more and one less/fewer than a number to 10.

In History, we learnt that ‘chronological’ means putting the events in order in which they occurred from first to last. We watched a short video to show us how castles had changed over time and then we created a timeline of castles. We discussed the materials that castles used to be made from and how wood easily sets on fire so the material changed to rock. We looked at the years in which the castles were built to help us put them in chronological order.

In Science, we have completed our ‘problem solving’ inquiry question ‘How can you protect the Golden Egg from cracking?’. The children were tasked with creating a contraption that would protect Jacks’ Golden Egg from cracking if it was dropped from the beanstalk. We worked in teams to make a contraption to protect the egg. Children used materials such as tin foil, paper, cotton wool and feathers to protect their eggs. One group had the wonderful idea of wrapping their egg up in foil and cotton wool and then padding a box out! We then put our contraptions to the test! Check out of photos below!

Today in Team EO we celebrated Number Day! Children were invited to wear a number or numbers to school and lots of children had got creative with their outfits!

Team EO have made some amazing number robots and a small group of children worked together to build a loose change tower in the hall on behalf of Team EO!

Our story this week was ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. We have read lots of different versions of Jack and the Beanstalk and have spoke about how they all have the same/similar refrain of “fee-fi-fo fum”.

Children have had the opportunity to draw a picture from the story and use their Fred Fingers to caption the picture or to write a sentence about it! Year 1's have been working hard to retell Jack and the Beanstalk by writing their own story books!

In the construction area, we have been busy using our wooden blocks to build our own models of castles!

In the creative area, we have worked as a class team to make our own giant beanstalk. We begun by carefully thinking how we could make our beanstalk green the children decided to paint it. Then we used our carefully cutting skills to cut out leaves before attaching these to the beanstalk. We have had some fantastic story scene paintings this week too!

Our maths activity this week was to build a beanstalk with the multilink cubes – we had to roll the dice, move the correct number of spaces and either add or takeaway the correct number of cubes to our beanstalk. We then compared who’s beanstalk was the tallest and shortest!

​For our funky finger activity we have had to carefully peel the spotty stickers using our thumbs and index finger and stick them along the outline of shapes!