This is week two of our visit to 🇨🇳 China! We enjoyed exploring noodles with chopsticks, making money wallets, creating Chinese flags, making dragon heads and then having a dragon dance around our school, Chinese writing and of course the food tasting! What a busy week!
As part of our Learning Means the a World theme, ‘Come Fly With me Asia’ we have been looking at China, it’s culture, traditions and what you might see if you visit. We looked at the Chinese Zodiac and the 12 animals that represented each year. The children in our class were born in either the year of the ‘dog’ or ‘rooster’. We went outdoors and raced against each other using the 12 animal masks to see who won each time. The children were great sports and had lots of fun. They have also been looking at Chinese writing and having a go! We also have a Chinese restaurant that the children are visiting regularly!
We have been learning about the Harvest Festival, why we traditionally have this festival in the UK and why. We then looked at various foods including fruit and vegetables and where they come from. The children used their senses to describe how they looked, felt and smell. They then became artists and drew some of the foods! Later, we will be tasting some vegetable soup!
This week Year 2 began their journey on their Four Seasons Project. This project will take a full year to complete as we use our surroundings and times of year to collect research, evidence and experiences.
We named our first task… Autumn Awesomeness!
On our Autumn walk around our school grounds we collected deciduous and evergreen leaves as evidence of the seasonal changes before working in teams to create brilliant natural art.
This afternoon Reception went for an Autumn walk in our garden. We looked for signs of Autumn, talked about the different leaves, berries and fruits we saw. We also talked about which animals hibernate as we could not find any frogs. After that we went for a run around on the grass.
We have been busy bees in Reception today. Exploring, making new friends and physical fun Friday outside in the sun!
We have launched our first theme of the year, which is based all around COMMUNICATION. During assembly the children found out how meerkats communicate with each other. Did you know that they take it in turns to watch out for predators and when everything is ok they make a low constant peeping known as ‘The Watchman’s song’? If a predator is spotted the guard alerts the others with a bark or a whistle.
People have been communicating with each other throughout the whole of human history, but how we communicate with each other has changed massively over the last 30 years.
We are going to be investigating all sorts of weird and wonderful ways of communicating in our new theme.
Reception had a fabulous day at the beach. Sunshine, a shallow dip, ice creams and so much sandy fun and exploration! A perfect end to an amazing year!
Year 1 and 7 Red went on a trip to the Centre For Life in Newcastle as part of our theme of Light and Dark. In the scientific part of the visit we experimented with moving cogs, built rockets, researched how astronauts live out in space (including how they go to the toilet!) and manned a space station. We also visited the planetarium and watched the story of Little Bear and saw all the constellations in our skies. In our geographical section of our trip we looked at animals from different continents and were able to name the continents and discover what the habitat is like on each continent. We then went into the play zone where we were able to create structures, shadows and role play. We had an amazing day and our behaviour was exemplary! We are so proud of you all!
