Happy Friday! We made it to the end of another week. There have been a lot of tired faces in school this week, especially yesterday after the football. The children have done exceptionally well to keep going and have completed some rather wonderful work. 
We have been reading a book called 'The Day the Crayons Quit', the children have thoroughly enjoyed it. We have then been writing letters back to the crayons and have been letting them know what we are going to do to help them. We had to use our most persuasive writing to get them to come back from their strike. We are really looking forward to sending these home at the end of term for you to read. Then, Mr Finch very kindly lent us the next book in the series so we were able to find out where the crayons ended up. 
In PSHE, we have been thinking about staying healthy and what we can do to support this. We have been focusing on fitness and exercise this week. The children have been testing their fitness by seeing how many of the same exercise they can do in a minute (e.g. star jumps, press ups, sit ups, etc.). There have been some outstanding scores! Most of the children have also now set themselves a fitness challenge for the next 2 weeks. One child has challenged themselves to do 50 sit ups a day!
On Wednesday, the lovely team from OCRA came in and ran a multiskills afternoon with KS1, which was fun if a little soggy (sorry for the wet PE kits!). 
I hope that you all have a lovely and restful weekend!

It has been another busy week of learning for Beech class this week. We have been thoroughly enjoying our new Geography topic of Dartmoor, focusing on where we live, including continents and counties! In Science, we are learning about the weather and are improving our observational skills by completing weather reports. In RE, we read a very interesting story from the Bible all about a paralysed man and how his friends helped him. This made us reflect on our own friendships and how we can show people we care.
In Maths, we have been focusing on our counting in 10s and counting to and from 100. Here is some of our learning:

Hope that you enjoy hearing about what we have been doing and are able to chat about it in more detail at home. 

Have a lovely weekend, 
Miss Coleman

We have had a lovely week in Beech class. On Wednesday, we had a wonderful music lesson outside in the sunshine with Miss Rowe. We have also been thinking about looking after our environment and some of our children even used their time to complete a litter pick. 

In PSHE, we have started our new topic of healthy living and have been thinking of ways to keep ourselves healthy. The children thought of lots of ways, such as exercising everyday, washing hands, eat plenty of fruit and vegetables, getting a good nights sleep etc. Here are some of our pieces of work, we drew things to keep us healthy inside the bodies and wrote top tips around the edge. 

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

Firstly, a HUGE apology, I am so sorry for not updating the blog sooner - it has been a hectic couple of weeks! 
We have been so busy in Beech Class, we have been thinking about our plants topic and have been watching and recording the growth of our bean plants. We have been using our mathematical skills to measure how much our plants have grown in a week. 

We have had a very fun PE lesson today and managed to get lots of equipment out. We have been focusing on ABC; agility, balance and co-ordination. We had 4 different stations; hurdles, balancing slalom, moving at different levels across a bench and pizza passing. The children had great fun while developing their skills at the same time. It was lovely to see them cheering each other on and celebrating each other's successes. 

It has been lovely to be able to welcome all the children back to school after the Easter holidays. It sounds like you all kept busy and had lots of fun over the break. 
We came back to school to a new classroom set up which the children seem to be really enjoying:
"This is such fun, I love learning like this"
"I do lots more learning now"
In Science, we are starting a new topic of plants. To get excited about this, we started by reading Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack left us a letter to say that he was running through the playground and some magic beans fell out his pocket. The children loved searching for the beans and managed to find 7 of them. We decided it was only right to return the beans to Jack and so we left them out for him and left a letter too. 
Jack kindly wrote back and has left us 3 golden beans to plant and see what happens. We will be planting these on Monday.

Here are some photos of us learning in the new classroom layout:

Beech Class have been so busy this week and done lots of lovely learning in a variety of areas.
In English, we have been reading 'The Dot' by Peter H. Reynolds. It is all about a girl called Vashti who doesn't believe she can create art, her teacher challenges her to make a mark on her blank paper. Vashti draws a dot, with encouragement from the people around her, she finds her niche drawing dots of all kinds - she evens opens an art gallery. We took inspiration from this story and the artwork of Kandinsky, and create our own 'dot' artwork. 

In Science, we have been learning about animal diets, Ms Fitzgerald created some fake poo for us to investigate. We had to dig around and find evidence of what the animal had been eating- this told us if they were carnivores, herbivores or omnivores. It was disgusting but great fun!

Wow Beech Class, what a first week back you have had! Ms Fitzgerald, Mrs Stoner, Miss Glanville and I are so impressed by how well you have settled back into school life and the classroom. You have done incredibly well and we are all very proud of you. This week we have spent time focusing on our emotions and wellbeing, taking time to make sure that everyone is settled and happy with the new routines. As well as that we have been doing some very fun learning!

In Maths, we have been practicing our counting in 2s. We made number snakes which we decorated and then had to cut out very carefully. Here are some photos of our work (and concentrating faces!):

​You also had a fantastic Science lesson from Pete at Wonderstruck, he taught you how to make rocket powered cars. The children did really well watching and listening to Pete's live lesson on the screen, they then worked very hard with the staff in the classroom to transform their fizzy drink bottles into cars. Then came the most exciting part, with the help of Ms Fitzgerald and a foot pump, the children launched their cars across the classroom. It was great fun! The children did really well explaining why they thought some cars went further than others! 
Here are some photos of their wonderful work:

Beech Class have come back from the half term holiday feeling refreshed and ready for some more online learning. We started our new geography topic for this half term: 'The UK'. We have been looking at the flags of the countries that make up the UK and at the Union Jack and how it is a mix of the different flags. Some children even took the challenge to create their own family flags! Here is some of our learning:

We also started our new Science topic of 'Animals'. During the good weather, we went out into our local area and observed the animals we could see. We noted down the animals we saw, which group they fit in to and where we spotted them. Here is some of our work:

Well done for all your hard work, I have really enjoyed looking at all your learning. Hope that you have a fabulous weekend!

This half term, along with all the other brilliant learning we have been doing, we have been learning about Brunel and his engineering feats. We have had an ongoing DT project to research, design, build and evaluate our own bridges. Here are some of them:

In Art, we worked on some bridge art with beautiful backgrounds. Here are a few to share with you:

Finally, I want to say a HUGE thank you to the children, parents and carers. This has been such a hard term with so many unknowns, you have learnt how to use the new online learning platform and have given 100% with completing your work to such high standards. I am so proud of every single one of you. 
I hope you all have a fabulous half term holiday and enjoy a break from online learning. 
Stay safe and well!

Last week, it was Children's Mental Health week, to help celebrate this and raise awareness about mental health, we did lots of learning around our feelings and how to express ourselves. 
We read a lovely book called 'Ruby's Worry' by Tom Percival. It is all about a girl whose worry follows her around until she shares it with someone. 
First we thought about what our worries might look like. The children drew their worries and thought about what shape and what colour they might be. Here are some of their drawings:

The children then reflected on what to do if we are feeling worried. Our top tip is to talk to someone and share your worry, the children did really well at identifying the people they could talk to; Mummies, Daddies, Brothers, Sisters, Friends, Teachers, Grannies, Grampas etc. We also thought that doing an activity which makes you happy. We thought about the activities which made each of us happy, because we are so unique there were lots of different ideas. Here are some of them:

Not only did we think about activities that made us feel happy, but we also thought about our happy places. We challenged ourselves to draw a picture of our happy place and write about why we liked it. Some of us thought about places in our homes, some of us thought about imaginary places with unicorns and some people thought about places abroad or where they have been on holiday. Here are some of our ideas. We wonder where your happy place is?

In R.E we learnt about parables and how they are special stories in the Bible which teach us lessons, we focused on the parable of 'The Lost Son'. To keep on the theme of mental health and reflecting on feelings, we thought about the characters in the story and how they felt. We drew each of the main characters and describes their feelings around the edge of our drawings. Lots of children did really well at empathising with the characters. 

There is still so much learning the children did which we would love to share, but this is getting very long, so we will finish with some science! In science, we have been learning about everyday materials and their properties. The children were challenged to go on a material hunt around their houses and find as many different materials as they could. Once they have gathered them together, they had to see if they could match the material to it's property, it was hard word, but the children did a great job!