Our collective worship monitors are doing a great job every week, helping to set up, open and asits our sessions both in the class and when we come together in the hall. This week we started to think about our new value of Humility, which is a new word for lots of the children. During our collective worship we learned that humility is about being modest, respectful and putting others before yourself. It is about gratitude. It is about good sportsmanship. We looked at some different scenarios and thought about who was being humble and who wanted honour.

Following our visit to Leeds City Museum we have received a postcard this week from Paddington Bear, telling us that he has also been to visit the museum and what he thought about it. The children then looked at some photos of major landmarks in Leeds city centre and thought of lots of different adjectives to describe them.

This week the children did a hot write (totally independent, show us what you know) and it was a descriptive write about Aliens Love Underpants. They were shown a picture from the story and asked to write a description about them. We focussed on using adjectives and noun phrases in our writing and some children also managed to use ‘and’ to make some M and M sentences. Take a look, I’m sure you will agree they have done a great job!

This week the children loved getting the bus into town to visit the Leeds City Museum. They enjoyed looking around the museum, looking carefully at old artifacts linked to our History and also the giant map of Leeds linking to our Geography. Lots of children really liked the exhibit downstairs with the animals which they remembered and linked back to our Animal Kingdom topic in Autumn. The children were great representatives for ACE, showing the public on the bus and in the museum exemplary behaviour and manners. A big thank you to all the parents that came and helped us on the trip, without you we would not be able to provide the children with these amazing hands on learning experiences so we really appreciate it!

1BN were all ready and raring to go when we returned to school on Monday but the weather decided to make things interesting for our return after the holidays. Despite the challenges of getting here, we have had a great week with brilliant attendance. We were one of only a few classes that managed 100% on more than one day this week which is incredible given the conditions on the roads and paths so well done everyone!

This half term we have been doing a ‘slow write’ for our early bird activity in the morning. The children are shown a picture on the board and have around 20 minutes to write at least one sentence about the picture. They are really good at writing an M sentence which includes a ‘who’, a ‘verb’ and a ’what’ but lots of children can now also add a ‘when’ or ‘where’ onto the beginning or end of their sentence or make an M+M sentence by adding the word ‘and’.

This week, as advent has begun, we started our book advent calendar. Last month the children all brought a wrapped book into school. We have numbered the books so that on each day during advent we can open and share the book with the rest of the class. That day they also get to open our chocolate advent calendar as well!

This week in Art we have been using clay. We used our hands and some tools to explore how to make different textures and patterns on the clay, focussing on the process and not the end product. Once we were done we could scrunch it back up and start again or let someone else have a turn.

On Thursday we enjoyed a visit to our local Moor Allerton library. After a chilly walk down the hill we were greeted by the librarian who told us all about how we can join the library, borrow books for free and also information like how many books we can borrow and how long for. After she read us a funny story about a witch who wanted to turn her cat black but instead ended up turning everything colourful. We got some time to look at different books and then as a class we decided on 5 books to borrow to take back to school with us. If you aren’t a member of the library yet, do pop in to join. It is easy to sign up and best of all it costs nothing! Also a big thank you to the parents who helped with our visit!

As part of our work on instruction writing, today we have made some vegetable soup. The children helped to cut the vegetables including carrots, celery and onions, then added tinned tomatoes, seasoning and stock. A group of children took the pan to the cafe to cook the soup and then used a hand blender to blend the soup. At snack time we all had a try of the soup, some children didn’t like it but there were some who had second helpings. Next week the children will plan and write their own instructions on how to make vegetable soup remembering to use time connectives, bossy verbs and hopefully even some adverbs.

This week has been Anti Bullying week and the children have been thinking about what bullying is and what we can do to help stop it happening. As well as learning a stop bullying rap the children took part in odd sock day on Tuesday. All the children wore odd socks to show our individuality, celebrate our uniqueness and remind the children that we respect everyone in our diverse school community.

Remembrance Day

On Monday in collective worship we had a Remembrance service to remember the service and sacrifice of those that have served in the nation’s defence. In preparation the children each made their own poppy then we made it into a poppy field to lay with the other classes during the service. This linked with the value that we are thinking about at the minute which is peace.

This week in our Talk for Writing, we have started to learn about how to write instructions. We started by making some marmalade sandwiches and ate them for our snack. After that we have written some instructions together using pictures and actions to retell them before we start to have a go at writing our own next week. Take a look at the video and let us know what you think of our instructions. Could you use them to make your own marmalade sandwich?