Terms 1 & 2

Our Key Question for Terms 1 & 2 is:

What makes a good superhero

and why?

We have a wonderful first term planned, with so many exciting things to do.

The first, most important job, is to make sure we are all happy and settled, know where everything is, and what we need to do!

Then we will begin the challenge of answering our key question...

Click below to see our timeline for Terms 1 & 2.

Each week new activities are put out for us to explore and challenge ourselves - we are encouraged to use the:

Finger Gym: to help with our fine motor control Literacy Challenge: which helps us develop our language and writing skills

Maths Challenge: which helps consolidate our learning from the previous week and covers everything from shape and pattern to adding numbers!  

Phonics Challenge: this helps us to pratise our sounds and key words

We have been learning about Harvest. Our chef, our superhero Mrs Jones (who makes our delicious lunches every day), set us a challenge.

She wanted us to design our own soup - something yummy and healthy.

We accepted her challenge and searched our garden where we could lots of vegetables had grown and were ready to eat!

We took great care to harvest the vegetables from our garden. We then washed them, and practised our knife skills by cutting them up. These were then made into a scrumptious soup - which we all had to taste to check it was just right

Whilst we were exploring all the delicious vegetables, we decided to use them in other ways too.  We cut some of them up and used them to print delicious meals. We had to match the correct colour to each vegetable.  We were so pleased with our meals that our teachers put them up in Spiderman's kitchen for us all to admire!

There is always so much to see and explore!

These photos show just some of the things we do when we first get into school in the mornings.

This is a lovely way for us to say hello to our friends and teachers, and to settle into class before our day begins...

We have settled really well into our classroom.

Our teachers are so happy with how we play and work with each other, how we can choose things to do for ourselves, and how we treat our lovely classroom and the things that are in it.  

When we hear our special music - we know what to do - it's tidy up time!  

We are super duper are tidying our things away!

Wake up and Shake up!  

This is so much fun - we laugh so much when we are following this!  It's a great way for us to move our bodies.

This table always has some books on it linked to our learning.  Here it has books all about Harvest, vegetables and farms.  

We love books in Diamond Class, and have been enjoying sharing them with our friends.

We have been learning about 2D shapes.  

It's nearly Mrs Wishy Washy's birthday and we got her a selection of shapes, as she likes making pictures out of them.  We decided we would try too. We explored a range of shapes, including diamonds and pentagons, and drew around them to make pictures of Mrs Wishy Washy's house.

We have been looking at how tractors are used to help harvest the crops. So we have used squares, circles and rectangles of different sizes and colours to make these tractor pictures.  

We have been making our Christmas cards using 2D shapes and hand prints!  We added sparkly details once they were all dry.

Once we had finished, we practised our hand washing skills from last week, to make sure all the paint was gone and our hands were clean. Our teachers were very proud of us as we did this very sensibly and independently.

We have been learning all about Portraits and Self Portraits.  We now know that a portrait is a picture of a person, and that a self-portrait is when make a picture of ourselves.

In our groups we made a Rubric.  A Rubric is a list of essential things that we must include when we make something, to make sure it's the best it can be.

We can make Rubrics for all sorts of things, but we made ours for 'drawing a great face'.  

We enjoyed looking at work by famous artists such as Warhol, Klimt, Van Gogh and Da Vinci. We used them to decide what we must have to make a great, realistic face, and what other details we could add to make it even better.

Then the next day we used our Rubric to make our first draft of our own self-portait.  We looked in mirrors to look at shapes and colours, and the Rubric really helped us to think of the details we need to draw a realistic face.

Our teachers were so proud of us, and thought our first drafts were amazing!  Our next job will be to critique them and the redraft...

Then we used our critique to give warm feedback, and used our Rubric to think about we would improve in our final drafts.

Our final drafts...

Can you see how our Rubric, drafting and critique has helped us to create some fantastic self-portraits?  We're so proud of them - as are our teachers.

We have made our own gallery in our classroom - look at the difference between our first and final drafts.  We are artists!

We have been learning about Superheroes, and their 'superhero powers'. We just loved being read the story of 'Superworm'.  It made us think about how Superheros and superpowers can come in all shapes and sizes.

We have been reading superhero stories, making superheros using lollypop sticks, designing our own superheros, making superhero identity badges.

We have enjoyed an autumn walk around school with Sapphire Class, searching for and collecting leaves of different sizes, colours and shapes.

We put the leaves in our class tuft spot so we could examine them using our senses of sight, touch and smell.

As part of Road Safety Week our local PCSO's came to teach us how to cross the road safely.  

We had to STOP, LOOK and LISTEN, and then LOOK again before crossing the road.

All ready for our dress rehearsal of our Reception production of 'Whoops-a-Daisy Angel'.  Don't we look fantastic!  

(A BIG thank you from all our teachers for all the brilliant costumes that were sent in from home).

What a wonderful way to end Term 2 and get ready for Christmas!  

We had a great last week of term, including our delicious whole school Christmas lunch made by Mrs Jones, our chef, and her team.