Welcome to Owls Class!

We hope you had a lovely break and are looking forward to meeting you all.

You will find our September Newsletter under the heading to the right. You will also find this terms Topic web and optional home learning grid under Home Learning. For your information, PE days will be on a Monday and Thursday.

Wk beginning 20th October

It's been a lovely end to the term. We hope you all have a lovely rest and enjoy the week off. 

Diwali

We enjoyed learning all about the HIndu Festival of Light. Then carefully coloured in patterns on our Rangoli designs. We also listened to some music and talked about how the music made us feel.

English

We wrote our information texts this week all about Owls. We wrote facts about their appearance, diet and habitat. Ask us what we can remember - We are experts now!

Topic

We learnt all about what happened after The Great Fire of London ended. How they made the streets wider, built the houses out of bricks, tried to make it easier to get water from the River Thames and began to develop their first fire brigade.

Wk beginning 13th October

Spelling

Our spelling pattern focus for next week is alternative spellings for u, o and or. Some of the words that we will be practising in our lessons are: glove, London, wash, watch, ball and tall.

English

This week we have been looking at non-fiction texts and we have been trying to identify some common features. We decided they had to include: 

1. Facts and information
2. Headings 
3. Photographs with captions underneath
4. Questions
5. Books often had a contents page and a glossary

Maths

We have been continuing to add and subtract numbers using our number bonds to 10 to help. We have also been using number lines to count forwards and backwards when adding and subtracting. Finally we looked at adding and subtracting 10s - we found that a 100 square helped us to do this.

Reading

This week we finished our book Meerkat Mail. Ask us what it was all about because we had to summarise what happened in the book, decide if we enjoyed the book and who we might recommend it to.

Art

This week we were investigating shading by drawing light and dark lines using a pencil. 

 

Wk beginning 6th October

Spelling

Our spelling pattern focus for next week is common exception words. Words that don't follow a spelling pattern. Some of the words that we will be practising in our lessons are: door, floor, because, most, climb, child, with, some.

English

This week we have just started to look at information texts. We did a cold write - We had to write an information text about an animal of our own choice. The children knew a lot of facts about a wide range of animals!

Maths

We have just started our addition and subtraction unit. We have focused mainly on number bonds to 10 and then we looked at number bonds to 100 and the discussed the patterns that we noticed. See if you can ask us questions on our number bonds this week.

Topic

We looked at all the reasons the Great Fire of London spread so quickly. We decided the main reasons were: 

1. The houses were made of wood.
2. The houses were so close together
3. They didn't have fire engines like we do now. They only had buckets and water squirters.
4. It was a hot and dry summer.
5. There was a strong wind that blew.

Science

This week, we have been exploring how materials are made waterproof. We were given a range of different fabrics. On one half of the material, we put a layer of wax crayon and then left the other side. Using pipettes, we put a droplet of water on each side. The side without wax crayon absorbed the water, whereas the side with wax crayon did not. This is because the wax doesn't have holes large enough for water droplets to go through, creating a waterproof layer. 

 

Wk beginning 29th September

This week we had an exciting visit from Nicholas' dad. He is an on-call firefighter, and he told us all about what he has to do for his job. He also compared fire safety now to what it was like in 1666. A lot has changed! The Owls had some superb questions to ask. 

Spelling

Our spelling pattern focus for next week are: ey, c and il. Some of the words that we will be practising in our lessons are: key, valley, face, place, pencil, fossil, city and there.

English

We have all been completing our Hot writes this week – our own recount about The Great Fire of London. We had to try and remember all the things we have been practising to make our writing better. What a great job the Owls did! We also looked a variety of poems on National Poetry day and decided which ones we liked the best.

PE

We have been practising our ball skills this term. How to catch and throw accurately, using an appropriate catching shape. Controlling the ball's force and aiming for targets.

Library

The children have been enjoying visiting the KS1 library on a Thursday afternoon and choosing a book to take home and share. If they can remember to bring their books back on a Thursday that would be really helpful.

Nest

We enjoyed making (and tasting!) apple crumble this week in the Nest, being careful with using the knife to cut apples up, and mixing oats and flour to make a crunchy topping. See the class gallery for some photos!

 

Languages day - Friday 26th September

In Owls class we learnt about Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines. We found out where the Philippines is located, what their climate is like and what the flag looks like. Did you know the Philippines consists of 7,641 islands? We learnt how to count to 10 in Tagalog and how to say some fruits. 

Week beginning 22nd September

Spelling

Our spelling pattern focus for next week are silent letters: kn, g and wr. Some of the words that we will be practising in our lessons are:

knee, know, sign, design, wrist, write, what and undo.

English

This week we have been pretending to be Samuel Pepys. We have innovated our model text to create a recount of what Samuel Pepys did and saw. The children have really been working hard on forming their letters correctly and trying to make sure they are sitting on the line. We also had a go at trying to start our sentences in different ways: eg Later, After that, On the way, Finally.

Maths

We have continued with our place value unit and this week we have been identifying missing numbers on a number line. We also had to estimate where numbers might go on a blank number line. Our top tip is to always look at what number is at the start of the number line.

Art

This week we were learning about a famous artist who also enjoyed painting portraits. We looked at some of Picasso's famous art work and discussed which ones we liked or disliked. We then tried to recreate some of his art work in our sketch books. See our gallery for some photos.

Week beginning 15th September

Spelling

Every Friday I will put on the website our weekly spelling pattern that we are learning the following week. We will also be practising some 'harder to read and spell' words each week too. There will be no spelling test. We are just practising these words in lessons.

Our spelling pattern focus for next week is g, ge and dge. Some of the words that we will be practising in our lessons are:

page, giant, charge, large, edge, fridge, was and they.

English

We have been trying to form our letters clearly when writing this week, really trying to improve our handwriting. We have also been looking at how using interesting adjectives can really impact our sentences. 

Art

Over the last 2 weeks we have been trying to draw portraits. When doing our self portraits we had to really think about where to draw all of our features. Using our drawing skills to carefully sketch our eyes, nose, lips, ears and hair. The Owls self portraits were amazing - we definitely have some future artists in the class!

Topic

This week we were looking more closely at London. Where it is and what you might see if you went to visit. We then compared it to London in 1666 and looked at how jobs, clothes, transport and buildings have changed.

We have also enjoyed a couple of trips to Forest School. We had a challenge - To work in small groups using team work to create homes for creatures and bugs who live there. See our gallery for some photos.

Week beginning 8th September

The Owls have made a great start to Term 1. It has been lovely to see them settle into new routines with enthusiasm, kindness and a positive attitude to their learning! We came up with our Classroom Charter and decided together what was important to help us have a happy classroom where everyone can learn together.

English

We all showed resilience this week when we wrote our cold writes - a recount about how someone escaped from The Great Fire of London. We have also just started to learn our new story map - we hope to share this with some of the other classes as we get better at remembering the actions.

Maths

We have been learning about place value this week. Identifying how many tens and ones are in a number and how to partition numbers to 100. Using a part, part whole model has really helped us.

Topic

We began our Great Fire of London topic this week. We came up with some interesting questions about what we would like to learn about. Here are some of the questions we thought of:

1. When did it start?
2. How did it start?
3. How did they stop the fire?
4. What happened after?

Computers

We had a great coding session this week. We learnt how to set a background for a game and then create our own sprite. We worked together to edit and change our backgrounds and sprites.