Our adventure for this half term is castles, knights and dragons! We began our adventure briefly whilst the children were still learning from home. However our first week back has been very exciting! 
We arrived in on Monday morning to find some foot prints in our classroom! The children at first thought this might have been a dinosaur! However they then suggested maybe it might’ve been a dragon! 

We then received a letter! When we opened this letter it was from a little girl explaining she had lost her dragon! This is when we thought that the footprints must definitely had been dragon ones.

With the letter she left us a book and a tuft tray of textures to explore to help us to find her dragon.

PE

The children loved their PE lesson this week. The children had the opportunity to master getting undressed and dressed again! They did a great job! We will keep practising this every week and by the summer they will be professionals! In their PE lesson they loved using the apparatus to balance, climb and move in different ways. See below for some pictures...

Spring 

This half term we are starting to look at the season Spring. We will be exploring what happens in this season and all things spring! The children will also be doing some planting and observing how things change and grow over time into the summer term.

This week we have taken our knowledge of our 3D shapes further. First we explored the names of the 3D shapes again. We then looked deeper at the shapes and explore what these shapes were made of. We explored what other shapes we could see in these shapes. The children enjoyed painting the different faces of the different shapes and printing onto paper to explore the other shapes they could see.

We also explored real life objects that were the 3D shapes we were looking at. The children then enjoyed finding objects in our classroom that were these shapes too! 

Today we have started our gardening project. We have had a great time getting started on all the jobs that need doing before we can start planting. We have been learning some of the names of spring flowers and using litter pickers to tidy up the area around the growing beds. Keep an eye on our progress as we head towards Summer.

To celebrate Red Nose Day the children could come into school in their own clothes and with a Red Nose Day accessory if they wished. We learnt all about the charity, comic relief, and understood why we were raising money. We also designed our own red noses, decorated buns and participated in a nose and spoon race! The children found it hard to not hold onto their nose on the spoon! We had a fun day making memories together.

This mornings excitement!

This morning the children were left some very strange clues that they had to explore! First we noticed there were a pair of legs dangling from our ceiling! We had a discussion about who this might be and the children thought of all different kings of ideas for who this might be...

• Both Greyson and Ettaka thought it could be Santa, because he wears boots!
• Penelope thought it might be a gardener!
• Ava and a few others thought it could even be Mr Cockcroft!

There were lots of discussions and guesses! We then noticed a large coat hung up in the bushy camouflage in our classroom. When we looked at how big the coat was we started to think if it could be our guesses! We still suspected Mr Cockcroft though.

In the pocket of the coat we discovered some beans, the children thought they might be magical beans and then Maisie suggested it could be Jack and the Beanstalk! When we discussed which character from Jack and the Beanstalk the children thought it must be the giant.

The children loved trying the coat on and trying to find even more clues in the classroom!

Over the last 2 weeks we have been consolidating our number skills on the unit building 9 &10. The children have had chance to really embed their skills. We have especially loved showing off all the different ways we can make 9 and 10!

Today we have explored length in our maths work. We have discussed what length is, how we can describe different lengths and ordering different lengths. The children then independently ordered some beanstalks by length too!

The children have helped plant our own beans to grow our own beanstalks this week! We planted some for our classroom windows in bags so we can watch the seed begin growing. We also planted our own individual beans so we could take them home and continue to watch them grow and hopefully be able to grow our own beanstalks! We discussed what plants need to grow and how we can look after them too! 

The children have enjoyed the story vegetable glue this week! We have explored the meaning of the story and the importance of eating some vegetables in our diet. The children enjoyed exploring a tuft tray we had set up this week to explore different vegetables the children may not have seen before. We learnt where and how these grow and explored opening them up to see what was inside of them! The children even got to try some vegetable glue too!!

The children have loved the Easter activities we have had this week! They especially enjoyed making their own chocolate crispie nests! We made sure we washed our hands before we started and we helped to read and follow the instructions step by step! The children worked really well together and they produced some tasty looking buns!

This morning we had an Easter breakfast for our last day! We tried hot cross buns. This week we have been learning about the story of Easter and understanding why we celebrate it. We discussed what the cross symbolises and the story of Jesus. Some children really enjoyed their hot cross buns but others weren't so keen on them!

Today we looked at our tadpoles again and could see they were getting very big. We discussed if it would be fair to keep them in the fish bowl for the two weeks we were at home. The children said they might even turn into frogs and hop around school if we did! So we decided together the fairest thing to do was to put them safely back into the pond and to go and visit them after half term! The children waved at the window to them as Miss Penny placed them back into the pond!

After the Easter egg hunt this afternoon the children traded in the plastic eggs we found outside for chocolate eggs! We enjoyed these with our treat we had worked so hard for by filling our pom pom jar. The children chose the treat we were working for and they chose a movie and popcorn! The children enjoyed watching Pinocchio with cups of popcorn and chocolate eggs! We even closed the blinds and turned the lights off to pretend we were at the cinema!

A huge thank you to parents/carers who helped the children to produce some fantastic entries to the schools annual egg decorating competition! I'm sure anyone can agree, they are all fantastic! Some very creative children with very creative grown ups too! 

I hope you all have a well deserved half term break, with no home schooling and hopefully a bit of normality too! I am excited for all the fun  and exciting things we have coming up after half term in our new adventure!