Week 1

Welcome back! After a wonderful Easter break the children have come back fresh and ready to learn. I have loved listening to their news about what they have been up to. It sounds like they've all had fantastic holidays!

Although this half term is only 5 weeks long we have many exciting things planned in our new area of study - Come Outside! We started the topic with a fantastic book called Oliver's Vegetables all about a little boy that will only eat chips. He visited his Grandparents and discovers lots of different vegetables and tries them all! The story gave us lots of different opportunities to find out how vegetables grow. We investigated the seeds of different plants and are looking forward to growing them this term.

Oliver in book, Oliver's Vegetables, eventually finds the potatoes and they made chips together...and so did we! The children talked about cleaning the potatoes and cutting them into chip shapes. We then cooked them in the oven after coating them in a little vegetable oil. They were delicious. I may have eaten more than one! 

Then we discovered where different vegetables grow. We learnt about root vegetables such as carrots and swedes and plants that grow above the ground such as runner beans, curly kale, cucumbers and tomatoes. We have started to create a vegetable based display with our student. We even painted using the vegetables including brocolli and carrots!

We have been looking after some visitors in our class since before Easter...our frogs! We currently have 2 tadpoles, several froglets (the stage between tadpole and frog) and many frogs. They jump so fast it's tricky to count! We love using the magnifying glasses to identify the changes and watching them swim and jump.

Finally, this week we have been thinking about the characteristics of effective teaching and  learning. This is all about how children learn. We have introduced the children to the word perseverance as this is an important skill for the children to learn when involved in particular activities or tasks. The children have really enjoyed accepting the challenge of persevering with their learning throughout the week. If you'd like to find out more about the different characteristics of effective teaching and learning, please click on the link below.

Have a wonderful Bank Holiday, I hope the sun shines as much as it did on Friday. I'll have my fingers crossed!

Mrs Rudkin and the enthusiastic RR team