Welcome to the Class 1 webpage! We are Nursery and Reception. Our teacher is Mr. Napper, and we are supported by Mrs. Wood.

Grizedale Forest Trip

21/05/18

So far this term, we have been looking at the story Wild by Emily Hughes. This tale is all about a mysterious girl, living alone with animals in the woods…! To bring this tale to life, we ventured off into Grizedale Forest to see some woodland for ourselves. We had a fantastic time habitat spotting, den building and developing our nature photography skills!

Thank you to all of the parent helpers who took the time out of their day to come with us. Without you, our trip wouldn’t have been possible!

Class 1 Travelling Nativity

In the run up to Christmas, we are becoming increasingly familiar with the story of the Nativity. Each day, a different child is getting to take Joseph, Mary and the donkey home as they are travelling on their way to Bethlehem. Thankfully none of our homes have been too full to take them in, so far…! Each step of their adventure is being recorded in our Travelling Nativity book, and it is lovely to see all that our knitted friends are getting up to around the village. It won’t be long until they reach their destination and baby Jesus arrives!

Week 10

Our Spider theme was woven through much of what we did this week! We are still loving these creatures, whether we are looking at them in English, Maths or our range of continuous provision activities.

Role Play

We split ourselves into two groups: the family members and the spiders! At the start, the family members were scared of all the crawly spiders, but after we saw their sparkly webs we couldn’t wait to put them on their leads to take them for their walk!

Spider Hats

What could be more fashionable than our very own spider hats?! We had fun making these in our workshop and then wearing them for our spider role play.

2D Shape Spiders

After hunting through the nest to retrieve all the spiders, we examined them closely to see which 2D shapes they displayed. We then sorted them into shape piles, named them and counted how many there were of each shape. Some of us used the shape spiders to create our own repeating shape patterns.

Malleable Table

We worked together to use the tweezers to count out the correct number of spiders to place into each labelled pot!

Water Tray

Our water tray remained curiously dry this week, mainly because it had been turned into a superhero arena! We used the landscape to act out adventures for Spiderman, Hulk, Captain America and Batman. It wasn’t long until we discovered the secret as to how to make all of their eyes light up…!

Web Weaving

We know that spiders are experts when it comes to making cobwebs, but how tricky are these to make really?! We investigated this idea by making our own webs by weaving on both our playground fence and through some of our hula hoops. Some of our webs were so good that even our pompom spider felt right at home in them! 

Cobweb Graffiti

The spiders had been very busy today: we found cobwebs all over our playground! We went outside to see how many we could find; we agreed that there were 11 in total. We then found a cobweb each to add a requested number of spiders; finally, we came together to add spiders to a freshly prepared enormous cobweb!

Week 9

We came into school this week to discover that spiders have taken over our classroom! They have made themselves right at home on the ceiling in their immense web; let’s hope they stay up there…! Our new spider theme launches us into our new focus text, Aaaarrgghh, Spiderby Lydia Monks. We will be delving into this for activity inspiration over the next few weeks.

Web Baskets

To develop fine motor control, we had to see if we could retrieve spiders from the web baskets using only a clothes peg. There was nothing scary in these webs!

Superhero Lair

We’ve had fun in our role play corner this week, dressing up as a variety of superheroes, including Spiderman of course! What does Spiderman keep in his cobweb lair?!

Hand Print Superheroes

We had a choice to make a hand print Spiderman, Captain America, Batman or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle this week! After making a hand print of the appropriate colour, we decorated it once dry to make our characte come to life! These now look great on our Role Play corner gallery. 

Spider Counting

One Maths activity this week saw us drawing a number card and then placing that many spiders onto our web. We needed to make sure we read the numeral correctly to ensure we got our counting right!

Spider Subtraction

The Reception children were introduced to subtraction by imagining that some of our spiders were being pecked off their webs! How many remained? We rolled a 10-sided die to see how many spiders we needed to start with; we then imagined that three were eaten. We recorded our calculations on whiteboards in full number sentences.

Spider Movements

In P.E. we found a huge cobweb on the hall floor! We practised moving around it like spiders, and then had to see how many flies (bean bags!) we could find to place onto our web so that we could have a snack. As there were too many spiders for one large web, we pulled it apart and took a strand of ‘silk’ elsewhere to make our own individual webs. There we could enjoy our flies in peace!

Week 8

With Bonfire Night approaching, most of our activities this week revolved around fireworks and rockets! We explored the history behind this occasion, learning the story of Guy Fawkes. The use of fireworks to celebrate the failed Gunpowder Plot made for an interesting comparison with their use in another culture to celebrate Diwali. A sample of our themed activities are shown below!

We didn’t need to wait for the weekend to see a bonfire, we had our own to use in our role play corner all week!

We had fun building our own fireworks displays in the PlayDoh using pompoms, sequins and pipe cleaners!

Fireworks have to be well packaged when being transported; ours were kept safe in a heap of shredded paper! We dug through this to find our numbered rockets, which we then arranged in numerical order.

For a Maths activity, we became rockets ourselves! After arranging ourselves in order, we had fun counting down before blasting off!

One of Reception’s Maths activities saw the children repairing broken rockets before they could launch! They did this by matching the pairs of numbers which make a number bond to 10. They used the bowl of cubes to investigate the different ways in which 10 items can be split.

We went outside to find two different firework trail sheets. We had to program the Beebot to be able to follow the sparkly trails. This was quite tricky but we worked well as a team to try and solve this challenge!

To create some slow-motion fireworks patterns of our own, we added some food colouring and water to a tray of Epsom salts. We made predictions as to what would happen when the different colours came into contact; we then watched to see if our colour mixing predictions were correct!

Away from the Bonfire Night activities, another game the Nursery children played for a Maths session was to roll a giant die and then take that many steps forward. We did this individually and then as a group; who has the longest strides?!

Week 7

To find out about this special time in the Hindu and Sikh calendar, we are enjoying a range of activities centred around Diwali this week. We have been making lanterns and firework artworks, and have been exploring the story of Rama and Sita in both English and Maths.

Firework Painting

Our water tray is being used for something a little different this week: making fire! We have had fun making bright paint explosions with our firework templates!

Rangoli Patterns

Something strange has happened in our sand tray too: where has all the sand gone?! Instead, we have found lots of multicoloured rice grains with which we were encouraged to make a Rangoli pattern. Now that these different colours are all mixed together, making a pattern is rather tricky so we are finding other ways to enjoy this interesting resource!

For one of their Maths activities, the Reception children were encouraged to make their own tessellating Rangoli patterns using our 2D shapes. Getting these out made us realise they contained a shape we were not familiar with: the trapezium! We explored how we could use all of our shapes to fit together so that they didn’t leave any gaps.

Lanterns

To light the way for Rama and Sita, we have been crafting our own lanterns. These have been fiddly to cut out but fun to stick together and decorate!

Rama & Sita Maths

To bring the story of Rama and Sita to life, we lit them a tea light trail so that they could find their way home! This gave us a great opportunity to develop our counting skills. As Rama and Sita moved along the trail, we each got the turn to extinguish a tea light. How many were still burning? We became increasingly familiar with the term ‘one fewer is…’.

The Nursery children also collaborated to make a model of Ravana. Can you count to see if he has the right number of heads and arms?!

Phonics – Becoming Graphemes!

Why should we always have to write our words?! Today we became the graphemes instead to bring the requested words to life! We had fun hunting through all the Phase 2 sound cards to consolidate our phoneme-grapheme correspondence.

Grass Snake Care!

Remember our grass snakes from a few weeks ago?! Well now they are getting out of control! So that they would look smart for after half-term, we had the fun task on Friday of giving them a haircut! These could probably be the first snakes in the world ever to have one! 

Week 6

Our new English text for up until half-term is Croc and Bird by Alexis Deacon. In this story, two eggs hatch side-by-side revealing both a chick and a crocodile hatchling. Unaware that they are different species, they grow up to be the best of friends and realise that they can’t live without each other. We have linked this text to this term’s learning theme of Respect; we can live and care for one another no matter how different we may appear.

Hatching Role Play

After watching video clips of both a parrot chick and an alligator hatching, we compared how these animals emerged from their egg. The bird hatched very slowly, whereas the alligator freed itself from its egg quickly. We then had fun reenacting these hatching speeds for ourselves!

Natural Object Initials

For this week’s mark making activity, the Nursery children went outside to gather lots of twigs and leaves which they then used to craft their initials. It goes to show that just about anything can be used to create letters!

Week 5

Our last week looking at The Gigantic Turnip still sees us having fun with vegetables and plants! We are looking at how plants grow as well as exploring how we can change a familiar story to make it our own. Check back later in the week to read our version of The Huge Carrot!

Signs of Autumn Walk

We ended our week by going outside for bit of a ramble! We were looking for signs of Autumn, which we found aplenty! We managed to collect fallen leaves of many colours, fallen apples, acorns and a few twigs. We also saw lots of different berries and even a few animals. We were treated to the sight of a not very shy robin which sang a song for us and found a spider in its dewy web. Hopefully, in a few weeks when we go out for another walk, we will appreciate just how much our environment changes as winter approaches.

Plant Pot Painting

Before sowing some seeds of our own, we have spent a couple of mornings decorating our own plant pots. Painting on terracotta makes a change from painting at the easel!

Bread Dough

What is the point of harvesting crops? To make food! We are getting into the spirit of things by exploring real dough. Not only is it fun to knead but it smells great too!

Supertato!

We all know vegetables are good for us, now they can come to our rescue too! Introducing Supertato, the world’s most heroic tuber! We have enjoyed using the materials to turn ordinary potatoes into something fun and exciting. 

Grass Snake Update!

We have been waiting patiently for our grass seeds to germinate, and after days of not much happening the grass appeared almost overnight! We have been fascinated by this change and have enjoyed describing how the ‘furry’ snakes feel!

Weeks 3 and 4

With Harvest Festival soon to take place, the first story we are exploring in depth this term is The Gigantic Turnip! We have undertaken various activities related to this fun story over the last two weeks, including model making, drama, vegetable sorting, gardening and soup making! Have a closer look at these below.

Henry’s Gigantic Vegetables!

We had Show & Tell with a difference in Week 3: Henry brought in some enormous vegetables he had been growing with his Daddy! We were all very impressed with these and they brought our story to life brilliantly.

Turnip Model Making

So we each had a turnip of our own, we made some using papier mâché. It seemed quicker than waiting for them to grow! Once they had hardened, we painted them and added leaves. We then used our turnips in our Greengrocers role play corner.

Vegetable Size Ordering

So the children were familiar with turnips, the Nursery group had fun trying to group turnips by size. It was interesting to see how able they were to discern how close items were in size to one another!

The children in Reception took this a step further. We picked any three carrots out of the pile, and then ranked them in order of length. To develop our measuring skills, we then used a ruler to determine how long they each were!

Turnip Drama

Now we know the story well, we had fun bringing it to life! Between us, we were the farmer, his wife, the cow, the pigs, the cats, the chickens, the geese, the canaries and even the little mouse! With some spectacular teamwork, we managed to pull up that monstruous turnip…! The mouse even had a good meal for her effort! The Reception children then wrote captions to go with these images, check back soon to see how we described the action.

Mucky Maths!

On Tuesday, the Reception children had to dig their Maths challenge up! Buried in the tyre were different numbers of vegetables. They had to excavate these and then sort them onto our playground number line. How many different types of vegetable did they find?!

Grass Snakes

So we can see plants growing for ourselves, we have made some grass snakes to observe over the coming weeks. These were easy and fun to do! We stirred some grass seeds into potting compost, and then stuffed the mixture into cut up tights. We can’t wait to see how our snakes will change in appearance as they grow!

Soup Making

After hearing so much about ‘turnip stew’ in our story, we made some for ourselves to see what all the fuss was about! We worked as a team to chop up turnips, onions, swede, carrots and potatoes which we then added to our soup maker. We had to make sure we worked carefully when using knives; we all showed good control when managing this risk.

Soup Tasting

On Thursday, we had a snack time with a difference: today we got to enjoy food which we had made ourselves! Our soup was delicious; even those of us who were unsure about trying it said it was tasty after they had had some!

Weeks 1 and 2

We celebrated a special occasion in Week 2: Happy Birthday Finley!

Our first topic this term saw us explore what our bodies can do! We have investigated our five senses in different ways, and linked these to the parts of our bodies which detect them.

Touch

We’ve had fun exploring and describing the textures of various materials with our fingers, including jelly, dried foods, baked beans and paint. We’ve even investigated what it feels like painting when the paint is frozen into little cubes!

Sound

We have explored sound in different ways over our first two weeks!

In one of our Phonics sessions, Reception had fun listening to the p-p-p-p-popping popcorn in the microwave! We used this as inspiration to think of as many ‘p’ words as we could, and we then practised our ‘p’ formation on the whiteboard.

We have all enjoyed making our own percussion instruments using our modelling materials. We don’t need much encouragement to use them!! We have also explored how we can use our collection of percussion instruments to tap out rhythms and count out beats.

Sight

We dimmed the lights so that we could explore what we could do with the torches! Using the acetate sheets, we explored how we could turn the beams of light into different colours. We also had kaleidoscopes to look through, with which we investigated how our movements changed the patterns of colour.

Smell

In our home corner, we have had a variety of fragrances to smell! This week, we have had lemons, limes, cinnamon sticks, cloves, flowers, star anise and soap to feel and smell. Some of these we liked more than others (which could be said for children and adults!). We even mixed some of these different items in our water tray to make our own ‘fragrance soup’.

Face Jigsaws

How well do we recognise ourselves?! We had a task to reassemble our faces out of the pile of jumbled pieces! Once stuck back together again, we signed our work to say who we are!