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!

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.