This afternoon we spent time celebrating all our achievements over the last half-term. Miss Overton asked all the grown-ups who lead a RWI group to choose someone to give an Incredible You! certificate to celebrate their hard work. 
We also had certificates  to celebrate improved attendance!
Team EO staff are so proud of each and every member of Team EO for all their achievements this half-term, here are the children who were given certificates! We look forward to celebrating the children's hard work and successes in the Summer Term!

Team EO have had a lovely last day of the Spring Term. 

​During dinner time we had a very exciting visitor come into our classroom to leave us a chocolate treat each! Just look at the size of the Easter Bunny's footprints!

We worked in small groups with Miss Crookes to make some delicious looking chocolate cornflake buns - we hope you enjoyed them!

For our Feel Good Friday activity we took part in a number of Just Dances. Here we are copying the dance moves from the screen:

After all the excitement from the Easter Bunny, bun making and Just Dances we ended our day with some relaxing Easter colouring sheets for our Incredible Us time - spending time enjoying our friends company!

Team EO have worked hard to learn to recite the poem and add actions too.
Reciting poems allows children to discover new vocabulary and use them in an effortless way and it is lots of fun.  We are looking forward to sharing our poem with Team CW tomorrow.
We will learn a new poem each week to perform!

​This week was our final week on our topic ‘Amazing Animals’, and this week we have focused on dinosaurs! Our story of the week was “Bumpus Jumps Dinosaurumpus”! We started the week exploring ‘How Dinosaurs Lived’. We found out that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago (we used our class timeline to help us imagine how long ago it was!) and found out that most dinosaurs were herbivores and this meant that they ate plants but some dinosaurs were carnivores and they ate meat. We learnt about how the teeth that dinosaurs who were herbivores were different to the teeth of dinosaurs who were carnivores – can your child remember the difference? Team EO also found out the different places where dinosaurs used to live such as: wetlands, forest, desert, North and South Pole and even the sea! 

We have had an extremely busy week - creating observational paintings of daffodils, adding spikes to dinosaurs for our funky fingers activity, writing “I can see…” sentences about dinosaurs, retelling and creating our own dinosaur stories and practising our pencil control by tracing over patterns!

​In Literacy our Year 1 children have finished writing their diary about what they have done on each day of the week. We have used purple pens to edit our writing and we have read our diary to our peers!

​In Maths, Reception have been continuing to develop their subitising skills. A key focus has been on developing our understanding of doubles to support subitising skills and our ongoing development of visualising skills: encouraging the children to look carefully at structured arrangements, such as those shown on dice and 10-frames, and then to close their eyes and explain what they see. 

 Year 1 children have been finding the missing part of a subtraction story and equation, developing our understanding that addition and subtraction are inverse operations and that addition is commutative and we have begun work on our number bonds to 10. We have used the song “Farmer Pete” to help us remember our number bonds to 10!

In RE, this week we have watched several videos about the Easter Story and we have spoken about ways Christians celebrate Easter. We also revisited the Muslim special time of Ramadan and again spoke about ways in which they celebrate. 

​This week we have continued our learning on ‘Amazing Animals’, this week we have focused on woodland creatures. We started the week learning the names of different woodland animals; fox, mole, otter, hare, badger, squirrel, hedgehog, beaver and owl. We also learnt the name of the previous animals’ habitats; den, burrow, holt, form, sett, drey, nest, lodge, warren and tree. Team EO have been learning and practising the Makaton signs for; badger, deer, fox, hedgehog, mole, mouse, owl, rat, squirrel and snake. Can your child remember the Makaton signs? Here is the link to the video if you want to practise at home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d01s4zgCq7g. Our book this week was “The Gruffalo” and we enjoyed joining in with the familiar and repeated refrains! 

Our funky finger activity this week was threading! We had to use our 'Peter Pointer' and 'Tommy Thumb' to carefully thread the wool through the holes! We have been practising our cutting skills to sort sea creatures and woodland animals into their correct habitats and we have been making our very own models of the Gruffalo - they have looked fantastic! This week in our writing area we have been drawing our own terrible creatures and using our Fred Fingers to say what makes them so terrible!

In Literacy, Year 1 children have unjumbled the spellings of the days of the week which Miss Overton had got all mixed up! We have also recapped previous learning on the prefix ‘un’ – we know by adding this we change a word into its opposite meaning. We have been writing our sentences about we have done on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, ensuring we spell them correctly and we have been using the prefix ‘un’ in our sentences as well as the conjunction ‘and’.

​In Maths, Reception children have developed their confidence in counting strategies, including counting on from different starting numbers. We have also considered strategies for counting larger numbers of objects, including those that cannot be moved. Year 1 children have been representing 'first, then, now' stories with addition and subtraction equations, we have also made our own ‘first, then, now’ stories and have written addition and subtraction equations to match. Finally, we have worked out the missing part of an addition story and equation if the other two parts are known. 

​In Science, we carried out an investigation to see which material is the strongest to build a bridge with. We used cardboard tubes to hold our materials up and we put wooden blocks on the materials to see which was the strongest. The material which held the most wooden blocks was the strongest. The materials used were; foil, paper, plastic and cotton. We used our talk partners to make our predictions and we found out that the strongest material was the plastic as it held 13 wooden blocks. The paper was the second strongest as it held 11 wooden blocks. The weakest was the cotton as it held 0 wooden blocks. The foil held 11 wooden blocks. 

​This week all classes have been celebrating the significant individual William Shakespeare. As a hook into our learning on Shakespeare Team EO watched a short clip about William Shakespeare and then learnt about his family, his early life and how he moved to London, Team EO were amazed to learn that he had invented over 300 words and phrases that we use today! Team EO then listened to ‘Short Shakespeare Tale – The Tempest’ before playing ‘Going on a boat journey’ where we had to use the stem sentence “I’m going on a boat journey and I’m going to bring my…”, the next person had to remember what the previous person brought and then add their own item. We had lots of fun!

Today, in Team EO, we have been developing our understanding of special times for Muslims. We learnt that Ramadan is an Islamic faith celebrated by Muslims. We discussed how Muslims are similar to Christians in that they believe in God, however Muslims only believe in one God “Allah”. Both Christians and Muslims have special books and the Muslims special book is called the Qur’an and both have special places where they go to worship – Mosque and Church.
 
Team EO learnt that Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, observed by Muslims worldwide as a month of fasting, prayer, reflection and community. We talked through a PowerPoint about Ramadan and then we shared 2 things that we had learnt. These included:

• “they wear best clothes to celebrate the end of Ramadan”.
• “they have a special meal after sunset called Iftar”.
• “it lasts for 29 or 30 days”. ​

We then thought about what we are grateful for and added our thoughts to a prayer mat. Some children drew pictures to illustrate what they are grateful and others wrote a sentence using the stem sentence "I am grateful for...".

This week in Team EO we have added a 'book voting station' into our provision. 
Each day there will be two choices and the children have to choose which book they would prefer to listen to a story time.
We are using tens-frame and glass gems to cast our vote on as this will also support our mathematical learning as we will be able to 'see' which story has more votes, we will learn to know that if one ten-frame is full that we can count on from ten and it will help us learn our number bonds of 10!
The story with the most votes today was 'Barry the Fish with Fingers'! 

This week we have been learning about ‘under the sea’. We started the week listening carefully to ‘Commotion in the Ocean’. Team EO enjoyed learning the names of different sea creatures and have learnt some interesting facts about them!
Children have enjoyed accessing our funky fingers activity this week which was to use the tweezers to ‘trace’ the lines with cheerios – this was a simple activity but really helps strengthen our fingers in preparation for writing!
During provision time, Reception have been consolidating previous learning by making doubles on a butterfly outline. We have used the stem sentence "____ is made of ___ and ___".

​In Maths, Reception children were encouraged to notice different attributes in groups of objects – such as colour, size or function – and to describe what they notice. We also used our experience of investigating doubles to practically explore even and odd numbers and investigate when a number can be composed of 2 equal parts. 

​Year 1 children, started the week using pictorial representations to find the missing addend in an equation – the children were then challenged with finding the missing addend without the pictorial representation! We then moved on to partitioning a whole into two parts and expressing this with a subtraction equation and we ended the week making addition and subtraction stories from a given picture and wrote equations to match.

In History, we have all learnt about the significant historical event ‘The Battle of Hastings’, we listened carefully to a short clip (https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/class-clips-video/history-ks1-castles-and-knights-william-the-conqueror/zmj9g7h) and then we were able to put the key events in chronological order. Miss Clementson was impressed with our use of vocabulary such as ‘King’ ‘battle’ and ‘invade’.

​In Computing, Year 1’s were able to identify that left and right commands turn the robot equal amounts left or right. We used our knowledge of the robot’s movement to input commands to move the robot to a given square and we were able to step through a given program one command at a time, to predict where the robot will move to from a given start position.

This afternoon Team EO were very lucky to take part in an 'Animal Encounters Workshop' organised by Miss Fury!

During the animal encounter workshop, the children got to see a tortoise, a millipede, a snake, a hedgehog, a skinny pig and a chinchilla. First, we were shown a tortoise which was brought around for the children to touch. Did you know that a tortoise’s shell is made of keratin which is a type of protein that makes our hair and nails?

Next a millipede was brought round for the children to feel, some of the children held it and said that it tickled their hands. Between the centipede and the millipede, the millipede it actually the nicer of the two. The centipede can feed on bats and mice, whereas the millipede feeds on plants. The most recorded amount of legs on a millipede is 750.

After that a corn snake was shown and some children were brave enough to hold it, even Miss Muckell held it. To hold it, the snake was draped around their shoulders with the child choosing whether or not to support its head on their hand. A corn snake it a constrictor snake meaning that they wrap around the prey to kill it before swallowing it whole by dislocating its jaw.

Then we saw a pigmy hedgehog. The man picked it up in a blanket because of it’s spikes. As he brought it round for the children to see it kept making a huffing sound with a slight jump, The man said that this was it’s defence this breed doesn’t roll up into a ball so it makes this sound to warn people off and the slight jump is it pushing it’s spikes into whatever is holding it. 

Next we were shown skinny pig which is a guinea pig without hair. Guinea pigs are herbivores. It is really important that a skinny pig is kept warm, the temperature must be no lower that 15*C. If it is lower the skinny pig would go into shock and die. Surprisingly the skinny pig’s skin felt like velvet.

Finally, we were shown a chinchilla. The chinchilla’s fur was so smooth and soft. Pet chinchillas require easy access to food, water, and hiding places, where they can sleep undisturbed for extended periods of time. Chinchillas don’t bathe in water, instead they have dust baths.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time so were unable to see the last 2 animals he had brought in which were a rabbit and a bearded dragon.

Team EO demonstrated excellent listening skills and sat really quietly and smartly throughout the workshop - what incredible children we have in Team EO!