It's beginning to look like Christmas!

The final 3 weeks of term are full of lots of festive fun, learning and special events.

The Christmassy feeling started with the decoration of our Christmas tree. It was fun adding tinsel and baubles. 

We have been very busy practising our Christmas Nativity Song - The animals in the stable. We thought of actions for the animals and sang beautifully during our recording. Well done everyone. We hope you all enjoy listening to it!

Christmas Crafts

The Chameleons love being creative and Christmas time offers so many fun opportunities to draw, stick, paint and collage. We have made Christmas tree hats ready to wear during Christmas Dinner, Christmas cards in the style of Jackson Pollock, lots of Christmas colouring and playdough crafts and a calendar.

A Surprise visitor

The Chameleons were very excited to receive a special visitor.. none other than... Father Christmas. He dropped off a sack of presents for our class with a ho ho ho!!

We guessed what the presents might be and then some of us opened them. We got some cars, a light box, a Christmas book, a hexagon puzzle and a ladybird balancing game. We took turns to play with them. Thank you Santa!

The Nativity Story

We walked up to the old stage on Tennyson Yard for a special reading of the story of Christmas with the Caterpillars. It was a super setting for the stable. Some of the children dressed up as the characters from the story. can you name them all?

We listened to the story and acted out parts of it. The children were fabulous. Then we sand our song 'Animals in the Stable'. Well done everyone!

Week 5

This week we have been learning about 'dentists' and how they help us to look after our teeth. We talked about what we do at home every day to look after our teeth. Then we watched a 2 minute video showing how to brush our teeth carefully, reaching every tooth. Miss Baron showed us a giant set of teeth and we talked about the different parts of our mouth such as the gums and tongue. We read a non fiction book to look at the day in a life of dentist. 

After that we had a go at lots of different activities inside and outside the classroom, including:

1. Writing words, sounds or numbers on to the teeth and brushing them out with toothbrushes
2. Counting out 10 teeth (blocks), rolling a dice and taking the matching amount away
3. Brushing the giant teeth
4. Cutting out foods and sorting them into good for our teeth or bad for our teeth.
5. Brushing out the chalk teeth outside for 2 minutes

Week 4

In RWI we have been working on our letter formation. We used whiteboards and practised forming the caterpillar letters. Then we had a go at writing some words with Fred Fingers.

In maths this week, we learned about size. We thought of lots of different words to describe the size of an object, including: big, large, huge, massive, gigantic, small, minute, teeny weeny and little. Can you think of any others?

We also played a game on the whiteboard where we had to compare objects and find the biggest one. We borrowed the cake stacker from Elmers and we ordered the cakes from biggest to smallest. We checked the sizes by putting the cakes on top of each other.

Week 3

We have been learning about the artist Jackson Pollock. He was a painter from America who became famous for his 'drip painting' technique. He used tools such as spoons and paint brushes to drip, splatter and drop paint onto giant canvases. We listened to a story about him and then we had a go at doing our own drip paintings to represent fireworks. We used black paper, warm colours and a big cardboard box. We made sure we had aprons on and pushed up our sleeves to keep our uniforms as clean as we could. The finished paintings looked amazing and will be used as the background to our new heroes display.

Forest School

We enjoyed our first visit to forest school. On Wednesday we did some activities with Mrs English.

On Thursday morning we worked together in groups to create giant shape monsters. We collected natural objects like leaves and sticks to make the sides of the shapes.

In the afternoon, we did a little PE session where we moved like the animals in the story 'Walking through the Jungle'. After that we talked about the birds and looked for nests in the trees. We discussed what we could do to help the birds find food in the colder weather. We made bird feeders by threading cheerios on to pipe cleaners. 

Week 2

This week we have been learning more about Fire Fighters. We watched a video of a tour of a fire engine and then talked about the different features we had seen. We talked about why fire engines need certain features such as a ladder, flashing lights and a siren. We wanted to know what sort of tools fire fighters use so we watched another video where a firefighter showed us in the lockers on the side of the fire engine. There were lots of interesting tools. Can you remember any of then and what they were used for?

Now that we had lots of information, we were ready to draw our own fire engines and describe them. Then we had a go at writing the initial sounds for the words. Some of us did over writing too. They are going to form part of a new display in our classroom.

On Thursday we had a special visitor via video call, Mr Hill who is a fire fighter (and also Miss Hill's Dad). We asked lots of questions to extend our understanding of the important jobs that fire fighters do. For example: Can fire engines go through red lights? Have you ever rescued anyone from the sea? Why do you wear wellington boots?

We also continued with our fire engine junk models. What a busy week!

Week 1

Welcome back everyone. This term we have lots of things going on including as visit to our Forest School on 17th, 18th and 19th November.

We have a new topic called 'Heroes'. On Monday we had a delivery of a box containing lots of dressing up items and a letter. The box was from Ted Bear who used to attend our school. He asked us for help to sort out his dressing up box as everything was mixed up. He needed to choose an outfit for Hero Day at Bear Camp. We tipped over the box and discussed what we could see. Then we thought about which type of hero each item might belong to. We found items for a paramedic, a firefighter and a police officer. After that we thought about our new role play corner and decided to make it into a hero house. Ted Bear said we could use some of his spare items and we thought of some others too, including a hose, an extinguisher and walkie talkies.

We enjoyed lots of fun and imaginative role play in the new hero house. We also made fire engines out of construction materials and junk models too.

We 

On Friday we talked about fireworks. We watched a video of some fireworks and thought of words to describe how they sounded and what they looked like. Then we drew fire work pictures, made collages and even a bonfire in the sandpit.