We've made it to the end of what's seemed like a very long half term! Thank you all for all of your hard work, patience, resourcefulness and resilience - you are an amazing class! Enjoy your week off. I hope you have the chance to relax and will be ready for the new half term and the upcoming excitement of Christmas. See you in November!

Our brief final visit to the Forest School today enabled us to gather some fallen leaves in various shades of orange, yellow and brown - typical autumnal colours! We took them back to the Creative Zone and used a range of natural pigments to recreate the colours of the leaves. The pigments included curry powder, ginger, turmeric, cinnamon and paprika - we left behind a very fragrant Creative Zone!

Our Forest School journey continued yesterday and, despite the freezing temperatures, we were visited by a range of leaf-based wild animals! Some, such as hedgehogs, foxes, squirrels, ants and butterflies, are common in Walkley. Others, like elephants, lions, giraffes and monkeys, less so!

We are very lucky to be able to wrap up this half term with a visit to the Forest School. Today we have completed a treasure hunt for natural items that were, for example, "heart shaped", "patterned", "fluffy", etc. The children worked in pairs to find ten items. These included leaves of various colours, shapes and sizes, feathers, berries, apples and a lump of charcoal!

Later, the children tested out their grammar skills by foraging for words and putting them into sentences. Despite its best efforts, the weather didn't stop us getting out into the fresh air. The sun even shone later on!

Continuing our exploration of 'Spectacular Spain', today we broke out the Flamenco outfits during our PE lesson and investigated clapping, posture, facial expression and the use of our arms and hands to express our feelings.

Now the Borrowers are settled into our new classroom at the top of the stairs, we have begun to get stuck into our daily routines.

We have our first certificate winners; LN - Golden Citizen, AW - Behaviour Superstar and QP - Whizzy Worker. It was a really difficult choice, as anyone could have won any of the certificates this week! I am certain future weeks will be just as hard-fought...

Our first piece of writing is underway, and below you can see some Borrowers dramatising a diary entry written by a lady who saw something very unusual at the 'corrida'.

We started reading the book Lola's Fandango.  As she is going to learn flamenco dancing, we need to design her a dress! We used images from the book to collect ideas of patterns for the fabric.   

Design Ideas and Collage Flamenco Dresses

And here are our designs and completed dresses.  The children tried really hard and did an amazing job of following their designs to make Lola's dress.