What are each class up to this term?
Here is a very short synopsis of some of the learning for each class. Please ask the class teacher for the class newsletter for more details!
Cedar – Miss Hume
Over the holidays Freddie the Fairy moved into the class. He is very shy so he doesn’t visit when the children are at school but he has written them a letter. He has asked all about their family and what they do outside of school so we are going to build up Freddie’s knowledge about our families. Later on I think Freddie is also going to want to find out about the difference between what children do now to what they did in the past (History focus).
Sycamore – Miss Pritchard
Our class is going to be learning about the ancient Egyptians and the civilisation that they built. We will be comparing and contrasting Ancient Egypt to modern day life and will have a design and technology project where the children make Shaduf’s (if you are not sure what these are, in the next week ask your child and they should be able to explain it to you!).
Oak – Miss Acres
We shall be exploring this topic throughout our Art lessons where we will be exploring 20th century architects and designers. As part of this we will be developing our drawing, painting and design skills before moving onto to three dimensional work next term. Through learning about different architects and designers each member of the class shall move towards developing their own preferred style of Architecture and use this to design a new class building.
Our class topic for History and Geography is the Anglo-Saxons, where the class shall be learning about the skills required to build and develop a society when colonising a new country. We shall be learning about many different aspects of Anglo-Saxon life and partaking in some exciting practical projects as a part of our learning.
Cedar – Miss Back
This term our topic is ancient Egypt and the river Nile. We will find out about life in ancient Egypt and how the Nile impacted on the people and animals in the region. We will learn all about mummification and even have a go ourselves – on a vegetable! We will be building our own ancient Egyptian inspired Shadufs. These devices were used to take water from rivers such as the Nile. We will work on our design and evaluation skills before we make our own. Then we will take part in a competition with other classes to see whose design can transport the most water without spillage. Let battle commence!
We will be visited by an expert in Ancient Egypt history from the RAMM. He will lead us in a fun-filled 2 days when we will get the chance to immerse ourselves in ancient Egyptian life.
In science we will be exploring electricity! We will find out about types of circuits, how a switch works and how to light a bulb. Once we have done this we will use what we have learnt to make a working torch. During our trip to @Bristol we will take part in a workshop in which students will learn about the energy sources that generate our electricity, investigate conduction properties of different materials (including playdough and the human body!) and apply their understanding to build circuits.
Willow – Ms Stubbs
In history we are investigating changes in families and homes over the last century or so. The children will be comparing their own lives to those of their forefathers to help them to understand what is meant by ‘the past’ and to identify differences in ways of life at different times. We’ll also be considering how we find out about the past and wondering whether all sources are equally reliable. Our trip to the Fairlynch Museum and walk around historic Budleigh in early October may provide us with some answers. Our families theme extends into our art work, as our focus is on portraits, culminating in a little art exhibition in a few weeks time. I wonder if you’ll recognise your child and yourselves in their artwork! In design technology we’ll be running a mini Grand Designs project in which the children will be designing and making their own rooms. (Please don’t throw away those new school shoes boxes!!) After half term, we’ll roll out our design and build skills on a much larger scale as we very much hope our materials work in Science and towns topic in Geography will equip us to build our own KS1 town. Music, drama and R.E. play regular parts in our school day, but will doubtless dominate in the weeks running up to our nativity play performance. And finally in P.E. we are fortunate enough for the first half of term to have Ms Kilburn supporting our learning, and all going smoothly, we should be swimming after half term.
Cherry – Mrs Fuller
Cherry Class have begun the term learning about building friendships and what makes us a good friend. We read a book called ‘Have You Filled a Bucket Today?’ which encourages positive behaviour as children see how very easy and rewarding it is to express kindness, appreciation and care on a daily basis. We will practise being Bucket fillers and not Bucket dippers! This book helped us create a class bucket of the qualities we all need to show in order to work as a harmonious team.
We will continue this friendship theme with books which remind us we can rely on old friends (family, special toys, pets etc) and how to make new ones.
We have been taking responsibility for building team-work and have all signed up for a role as part of Cherry Classes’ ‘community helpers’. Please take a look on the whiteboard in the classroom for details of the roles and responsibilities. We carry out this role for a week, with new roles assigned at the start of the new week.
We are also working on building confidence and resilience. We read a story about Splat starting Cat school and thought about how similar his first day was to our, including how he felt. We all felt a little worried on the first day, but were just as excited as Splat to start the second. We will all soon sign up to the ‘Give it a Go’ club in Cherry Class as our confidence grows.
We are excitedly watching the building of the new classrooms and using our outside space to monitor the progress. We are also remembering the importance of safety on a building site and always ensure we wear our hard hats, hi viz jackets and goggles!
After Half-term we will be looking at stories with a building theme, e.g. ‘The Three Little Pigs’ and also non fiction books and poetry.
We are also looking at building a family tree, studying portraits and building an understanding of the wider world, God and the Creation.
We will be building our repertoire of songs, constructing sound pictures, composing and performing music using ‘junk instruments’, body percussion and some more conventional instruments!
Apple – Mrs Broad and Wilkinson
We focus this term on ‘building’ friendships. Your children will be meeting new friends, learning to share and respect each other’s belongings and becoming increasingly independent. In the FSU we have lots of independent learning and circle times for your children to enjoy their own curiosity, being active learners, bouncing back after difficulty and being resilient.
We will have many opportunities to meet each other with our ‘Parents as Partners’ events, dates are listed below.
Please make sure you use Tapestry to let us know of any events where your children have persevered, taken a risk, bounced back, had their own ideas, etc as it will help us to build a really good picture of their interests and abilities.
Plum – Mrs Jenkins and Mrs Cawthera
In our class we are building our relationships, our confidence and our ideas through play. We are playing and exploring in our new classroom and visiting new places around the school. We are building a picture about ourselves, our feelings and the things we like to do. This half term we will be exploring the festival of Harvest and building on our knowledge of other cultures.
Beech – Mr Lee
Our main topic for the term is Ancient Egypt – a perfect topic for our whole school theme. The learning experiences will build upon the prior knowledge of the children and their interests within the topic. We have already started by developing their concept of where the Ancient Egyptian period fits into the historical timeline (our 60m running track became 6000 years). Within Art pupils will be developing their drawing skills in relation to Egyptian God and Goddesses and in Design Technology we will be building a Shaduf and transporting water from the River Nile (if we use our imagination). In Computing, pupils will be using developing their logical thinking in relation to algorithms (some of these lessons will be ‘unplugged’) and building a simple program using Scratch. In Science, we will learning about electricity/electrical safety and building electrical circuits.