The children have had an amazing time settling in to Birch Class. They have all been superstars. I am so proud of how confident they have been when making new friends, becoming familiar with our new routines and embracing new challenges and learning opportunities!

This week, we started our adventure! The children noticed something strange on their way into class this morning. There was some slime on the floor but where did it come from?!

When we went back inside we had received a voice note from an alien! We couldn’t believe it, it said he was called Moz and his spaceship had crashed at Westwood. He had never been to this planet before and couldn’t see anyone who looked like him…We decided to draw or paint portraits of ourselves so he could get a closer look at our faces and know what the features were.

When Aylah was tidying the sand this morning this noticed something buried alongside some of the toys! Moz had left us his family photo album. We looked through it and found pictures of his Mum, Dad, Grandma, Grandad, Auntie, Uncle and all of his cousins. They were all unique in size and age just like us and our families. Here are some of our family drawings.

We gathered pictures of our families in class and started to think about how we looked when we were younger and how we might look when we got older. He talked about how when we were small we couldn’t walk properly and when we get older our faces change and our skin becomes more wrinkled. Here our interpretations of the younger us and older us below. 

We have all really enjoyed our first PE lesson in the hall. We played a game which involved lots of running around and following instructions.

Moz wanted to know what our houses were like as he had seen lots of buildings when he had landed. We went on a local walk and looked at what homes looked like and compared their features to the other buildings around.

We then drew pictures of our own houses for Moz.

We loved PE today! We saw an ambulance on our local walk talked about the doctors who help us. We then became ambulances having to find big spaces and travel in different ways. We then challenged ourselves further by some of us becoming the virus trying to catch the others whilst some of us were doctors trying to help them. The urgency of this game added to the challenge of us looking for spaces whilst travelling around safely. 

Moz had been eating too many apples which gave him a poorly tummy but where was he getting them from? The children were given an aerial map of the school. We looked at it carefully and thought about what we thought the different features were on the map. We thought the grey lines might be paths and the big grey area was the school roof. We then took the map outside and stopped in various places so we could talk about what we could see and compare it to the map. The children could find trees, field, building, car park, play ground and the school pond. Eventually we located the apple trees!

We loved using the maps so much that we decided to develop our skills further! This time we ventured outside of school to Middleton Park. The children were amazing at using their maps to identify the path, pond and trees! We then used our knowledge about Autumn to spot and collect some of the signs such as different coloured leaves and horse chestnuts. 

After using our maps to find the apple tree, we decided to make him a tasty snack using the apples. Some of us chose apple crumble, some chose apple cake and others chose toffee apples. We drew our design and used our phonics to try and label it.

After deciding what apple snack we thought Moz would like best, we then had a go at making it. We all got to choose to make chocolate apples, apple cake or apple crumble. 

Next week the festival Diwali takes place. We learnt that this is celebrated by Hindu’s and is known as the festival of light. We listened to the story of Rama and Sita and how preparations begin for the festival. We learnt that they create Rangoli Patterns outside their homes for good luck and light Diva lamps.

We created our own Rangoli patterns and Diva lamps.

We learnt that part of celebrating Diwali is having a feast. We talked about how this is similar to Christians celebrating Christmas. We all then tried some Indian food. The poppadoms we our favourite!