Welcome to Scarlet class
Based in class daily will be Teacher Jennifer and Teaching Assistant Christine. Within our Red pathway we have flexi-staff Karley and Kelly who will be shared between classes. Amanda will cover teacher planning time on Wednesdays.
Our topic this half term is
Mini-beasts
Below is our Medium term plan. Please take a look and see some of the things we will be doing. It also has a 'home' section on with some ideas that you can do with your child that link up to our topic. We'd love to see some photographs and hear all about your adventures! Please send any photos or updates through our school Dojo app.
Wow, what a busy start to the school year!
We have all settled into our new class and are following school routines really well.
We have loved exploring our tuff spots filled with soil and bugs, measuring worms in sand, pipe cleaner worms, spaghetti worms and natural resource building blocks. We have been making a bug hotel using large building blocks and playing musical instruments along to songs about bugs. In our Sensology session we were using our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell and touch to explore things you would find in the garden. We enjoyed a snail themed Attention Everyone session and then made our own playdough snails. We also had a visit from some slugs! Everyone had a good look at the slugs and some of us were even brave enough to hold the slugs.
Queen Elizabeth II
To remember our Queen who sadly died we learned all about her. We looked at photographs of the Queen and watched some songs and videos about Royal families. We also found out that the Queen loved Paddington Bear, whose favourite sandwiches were Marmalade! We made a shared Paddington bear collage for the display board in the entrance and followed instructions to make our own marmalade sandwiches in Cookery.
We have continued to explore Autumn and the world of mini-beats in class and have so far focused on snails, slugs, worms, caterpillars, butterflies and bees. We have loved exploring our filled tuff trays of real grass, threading beads, various constructions blocks such as duplo and wooden blocks, coloured rice, flower stickle bricks, honey cereal, fabric leaves and colourful fabrics. We made our own beehives using paper tubes and pine cones then molded our own bees using playdough, pipe cleaners, googly eyes and cotton buds. In art we have created some fabulous art work for our display board including paper plate bees, symmetry butterflies and hand print caterpillars.
During our Nature class we have really enjoyed exploring in the garden. We have been digging in the soil, looking under rocks and logs and inside plant pots. We have inspected and handled more creepy crawlies including snails, woodlice and worms. Some were slimy, some were ticklish and some were very wiggly! The changes in weather has also provided lots of lovely learning experiences.
In our Early Maths session we have been focusing on ordering numbers 1-10 with the help of yellow and black stripes, in keeping with our bee focus. We have also been counting out bee and butterfly props with the support of number tiles and our talking device.
In our PE sessions we have been acting like bugs! We have used spots on the floor to hop like grasshoppers, beanbags and hoops to carry things above our head like ants, voil fabrics to flutter round like butterflies and buzzed around under a large parachute like bees. We have also been practicing our throwing and kicking skills with PE equipment on the MUGGA pitch.
Our sensory story this half term is 'Superworm' by Julia Donaldson. We have all enjoyed exploring props from the story including sticky honey, a stretchy worm in soil, a squashy lizard toy, plus more! Alongside the story we have been learning the matching Makaton signs.
In our Cookery sessions we follow the same recipe each week for the duration of the half term. We do this to build upon our skills each week, remember the sequence of the cooking method, have enough time to practice fine tuning our newly learned skills and eventually produce a finished product independently or with very little adult input. A very good skill in preparing for adulthood!
This half term we have focussed on making chocolate milkshakes!
We have used instructions to POUR milk, SCOOP the chocolate powder, TWIST the lid on, PRESS the button on the blender to mix, OPEN the lid and POUR the milkshake into the cup. After 7 weeks of trials, spillages and triumphs we can now make our own milkshakes! Some of us can even do the whole sequence independently, without any adult input or visuals!
We have had more visitors in Scarlet class including spiders and worms! Some of us enjoyed holding and feeling the Mini-Beasts and some of us preferred to look from a distance!
When focussing on ladybirds we counted spots on its back, made our own ladybird independent artwork and explored various red construction blocks. During our spider week we loved playing with the guttering pipes and singing Incey Wincey spider as we rolled the balls down the pipes. We also made playdough spiders, counting their legs and had fun splatting paint spiders and throwing spider darts in Attention Everyone.
In our music sessions we have all enjoyed taking turns to play musical instruments along to some songs on the whiteboard. We have explored guitars, drums, rain sticks, triangles, tambourines and glockenspiels.
We have loved celebrating Halloween in our last week before the school holidays. We have enjoyed exploring lots of spooky and messy tuff trays and finding hidden Halloween props in various resources such as sand and foamy bubbles! We played with our ghost train tracks, made Mummy lanterns, ghost plates and cotton bud skeletons in Art and stamped pumpkin apples in our independent art session.
In PE we pretended to be ghosts with fabrics over our heads, did pumpkin bowling and ring toss onto the witches hat!
We used our senses during our Sensology session to listen to a witch cackling, smell pumpkins, taste toasted marshmallows, feel gooey slime and watch sparklers!
