Dance Your Socks Off - Merengue

Ello' Ello' Ello'...is this your vehicle sir?

Walkley Primary school was very fortunate this week to have PC Amy visiting us to help with looking after the roads around us. Our Walkley Wardens have been patrolling with the help of PC Amy and have been issuing polite notices to those parents who park unsafely when dropping off their children. PC Amy also brought her police car and allowed the children to explore it. "Don't worry Mr Drew, they won't find the siren...." NeeeNawwwNeeeNawwwNeeeNawwwNeeeNawww!!!!!!

Forest School

Our forest school experience has been a mixture of sun and rain this term. Luckily most children were well kitted out for all weathers thanks to you diligent parents. Some days I had to encourage them not to put their snow suits on!

Although the children are always desperate to toast marshmallows, we started with a nature walk. The task was to collect different leaves and make a leaf kebab. They then had to compare the shapes of the leaves to their leaf spotter sheet:

Marshmallows at last!

On our last day we looked at some work by environmental artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and Chris Drury who use natural woodland materials to build and create 3D art and sculpture in the woods. The children were given the task of building their own twig tower sculptures in our forest school.They were encouraged to gather some twigs, ready to create their twig towers. It could have a square base, a triangular base or be of their own designs. Whilst we worked, Mr Butler built a fire and when it was ready, it was time to toast!

Creative Curriculum

We began this year by looking at traditional tales in year 1. Traditional tales have developed over the years in England and a staple set of stories that have inspired millions of children have come from the wonderful Julia Donaldson. It’s impossible to imagine a time before every child’s bookcase contained a sticky-finger-marked, lovingly well-read copy of The Gruffalo, so great has been the impact of former Children’s Laureate, author, poet and song-writer Julia Donaldson. Her extraordinary imagination has produced classics such as Stick Man and Room On The Broom amongst many others, making her undoubtedly the most popular author for very young children writing today. Our favourite though has to be The Smartest Giant In Town. This fabulous story follows a giant, who in many traditional tales is the baddie of the story. Our giant starts off as very smartly dressed, but after demonstrating his huge kind heart, ends up losing most of his fancy clothes.

This term we will be retelling the story through drama. First we had to create our own masks that we will be using in the performance. The children were shown how to make a collage from tissue paper, carefully choosing the right colours to bring out the features of each animal:

The Learning Zone

Welcome back to school Giants!

Now the children are in year 1, they will have a mixture of play-based learning, a national curriculum delivered through our creative theme-based projects and a fantastic maths programme based on White Rose and Big Maths.

Walkley prides itself on teaching the children how to focus on their learning whilst engaging them with fun lessons. The core part of this is the Learning Zone. Pictured above are the Giants sitting in the learning zone. This also includes being independent and helping each other understand the work.

White Rose Maths

White Rose Maths is about building a whole new culture of deep understanding, confidence and competence in maths – a culture that produces strong, secure learning and real progress. Each area of numeracy is taught using varied fluency. This means that when a child understands a concept, it doesn't matter how they encounter it, they will use their mastery to answer the question. It is a scheme that encourages the use of manipulatives as well as pictorial examples. In this way children learn each concept with concrete examples, pictorial examples and then finally understand it in an abstract way: