Spring 2 – 2024

Spring 1 – 2024

English

In English, we read the book ‘The Night Pirates’. We found out that a naughty pirate had escaped! We wrote wanted posters to help everyone at Rise Park find the missing pirate. We learnt how to use fronted adverbials and powerful adjectives so everyone knew what the missing pirate looked like. We also wrote instructions and made our very own parrot. We wrote our own instructions as well as reading and following instructions carefully.

Maths

In Maths, we have been focussing on place value, addition and subtraction within 20.  We have done lots of work on comparing numbers, counting forwards and backwards. We used a new strategy from the ‘problem solving toolkit’ of draw a diagram to help us to solve a problem about how many crocodiles and parrots there could be if we could see 16 legs. Can you solve the problem too?

Science

In Science we have been learning all about weather and seasonal changes. We monitored the weather for a week and recorded what types of weather we had seen. We talked about what the most frequent type of weather was and predicted whether or not it would be the same the following week. We learnt that in winter the weather is colder and the days are shorter and in summer the weather is warmer and the days are longer. We also had great fun testing our pirate ships, seeing if they could float and how much treasure they could hold!

Art

In Art, we used skills of painting and printing to make our own pirate bandanas. We learnt about the artist Orla Kiely and took inspiration from her printing work. We enjoyed looking at the patterns and colours she uses. We learnt how to mix secondary colours so that we could use our favourite colours on the bandana. We loved drawing our own designs into a polystyrene tile and seeing our own designs come to life!

Geography

In Geography, we explored Great Britain and the United Kingdom. We enjoyed looking at maps with our partner and found Nottingham. Then we labelled the four countries that make up the United Kingdom and the surrounding seas onto our maps. We learnt about what a flag is and where we might see flags. Our favourite lesson was using directional language to find treasure on a pirate map.

Autumn 2023

Autumn 1

English

In English we have been focusing on superheroes and have enjoyed two different books, ‘Supertato’ and ‘Charlie’s Superhero Underpants’.  We made our own supertatoes and used different adjectives to describe them.  We were really surprised when pants appeared all over our classroom!  We discovered that they belonged to Charlie but he had lost his special POW pants!  We discovered that Charlie’s washing had blown away all over the world and we had to search for it!

Maths

In Maths we have been consolidating some of our key skills and have been focusing mainly on numbers to 10.  We have practised sorting and explaining our given criteria.  We have ordered numbers, counted forwards and backwards, compared numbers using the vocabulary ‘greater than’ and ‘less than’ and used part whole models to partition numbers in different ways.

Science

In science we have been learning all about our bodies.  We have labelled the different body parts and we have investigated each of our 5 senses.  We were even brave enough to taste some different foods without looking at what we were putting in our mouths!  We used our ears to listen outside, our hands to feel objects in the feely bags, our eyes to spot things that are different colours and our noses to guess what was hidden in the pots!

Art

In Art we have been developing our drawing skills.  We have done some observational drawing of fruits, taking time to consider the size, shape and colours.  Then we have been focussing on our self-portraits skills.  we have studied some of the self-portraits created by Vincent Van Gogh and we have given our opinions on his work.

Geography

In Geography we have been learning about our local area and we have been developing our fieldwork skills.  we have tried hard to remember our own addresses including our house numbers and our street names.  We loved our walk around our local area of Rise Park where we saw amenities such as the pharmacy, the hairdressers and the café.  We really liked the fish and chip shop and we also saw Rise Park church.  We talked in detail about road safety and where it might be safe to cross the road.

Autumn 2

In English we have been focussing on Bonfire Night and Christmas. We used fireworks as our inspiration for writing a poem. We watched and listened to fireworks and then used onomatopoeias to write our own repeating poems. Then a present arrived in our classroom. It was ‘The Jolly Postman’ book but all the letters had fallen out the envelopes! We had to work together to work out which letter belonged to which envelope. We enjoyed reading the letters so much that we then wrote our own letters to Santa.

In Maths we have been focussing on addition, subtraction and shape. We have practised creating fact families with given numbers. We have done lots of work on ordering numbers, counting forwards and backwards and even finding missing numbers using the guess, check and improve strategy from the ‘problem solving toolkit’. We enjoyed a shape hunt where we looked to see how many different 2D and 3D shaped we could see around the school.

In Science we have been learning all about materials. We really enjoyed going on a material hunt around school to see how many different materials we could find.  We used labels to show what the material was. We then thought about the properties each material had and described each one using words like shiny, dull, rough and smooth.

In DT we have been learning about mechanisms. First, we had to practice our cutting skills, making sure we could cut straight, curved and zig zag lines. We used our cutting skills to make a paper chain for the classroom. Then we learnt how to make a moving picture using a slider and a lever. Once we had learnt about each mechanism we designed and made our own moving pictures for our favourite story book.

In History we have been learning all about our personal history. We had fun looking at our baby photos and guessing who we thought the photo might be! We created a timeline ordering the life stages from a new born baby to an elderly person. We enjoyed sorting objects that we may have used in the past like dummies and baby bottles and objects we use now like teddies and cups. We talked lots about how we have changed since we were a baby and thought about what we might like to do in the future.

In Music, we have been learning all about pulse and rhythm. We learnt to clap the rhythm of our names and played a call and response game where we played different rhythms from nursery rhymes.