The children have been busy getting ready for our Great Fire of London house burning celebration next week. In DT we have designed our Tudor houses in our books with our partners then we have painted our boxes white ready to add a roof and some detailing once they are dry. Everyone is looking forward to our celebration next week although some of the children are feeling a little sad that they will have to burn their house after all the hard work that they have put into them.

Mystery Reader

We were very excited to welcome a Mystery Reader into 1BN yesterday afternoon and the children were all so surprised to open their eyes and see this Mum sat ready to read us all a lovely story. She read them a story called The Hospital Dog by Julia Donaldson who is one of our favourite authors. Please email the office if you (or any grandparents) would like to come into 1BN to be a Mystery Reader.

Today was World Poetry day and 1BN learnt a poem by the author Julia Donaldson called Handy Work. The children can name lots of stories that Julia Donaldson has written and we talked about how she is known for her rhyming stories. We also talked about how poems can rhyme but they don’t always. The children learnt the poem using actions to help, we think they did a great job at learning it so quickly. They also had a go at writing their own Handy Work poem.

On Thursday the children were given the opportunity to take part in the colour run for the festival of Holi. Holi is a popular and significant Hindu festival celebrated as the Festival of Colours, Love, and Spring. It celebrates the eternal and divine love of the deities Radha and Krishna. Parents came along to join in the fun and everyone got into the spirit of the event, looking so colourful by the end.

Indian Dancing

The children also took part in some Indian dancing on Thursday in our dance studio. They were given belts that made a great noise as they danced and also a Bindi to wear on the centre of their foreheads. The children listened really well to their instructions and enjoyed putting the moves together to create a dance.

On Tuesday the children enjoyed going onto the MUGA to take part in some relay races for Pancake Day. The children were split into teams and raced across the pitch with a frying pan and pancake. The following day some of the children enjoyed sharing what toppings they had on their pancakes at home on Tuesday evening and there was a wide variety including lemon, sugar, strawberries, syrup, biscoff and, of course, chocolate spread! During Lent the children will be learning all about Shrove Tuesday, Lent and Easter and what these mean to Christian people.

This week in Science we went for a walk around our school grounds to look for the first, exciting signs of Spring. The children used the iPad to take photos of the things they noticed. We spotted the first spring flowers including daffodils, crocus’ and snowdrops which we learnt all grow from bulbs.

Beebots

This week in Computing, we have started to learn how to use the Beebots. The children had not used the Beebots before so were very excited to see how they work. We learnt how to programme the Beebot using the arrow buttons and also that we need to press clear to remove any previous directions given. We will be continuing to use the Beebots throughout this half term so keep checking the blog for more photos.

Our DT project this half term has been to make our own alphabet books. The children spent a long time carefully making a page for each letter of the alphabet as well as designing a front cover including information such as a title and the author. The trickiest part was definitely sewing the spine of the book but luckily we had our resident expert, Mrs Hirst on hand to help. The children were so proud of their work and couldn’t wait to bring their books home to show you. We hope you will add these to your book collections and enjoy looking at it together with your children.

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!