Hello everyone,

It was great to see you all at our 'Family Friday' this week, we hope you all enjoyed the different activities! 

In maths our main focus this week was around verbal counting and patterns. We practiced counting forwards and backwards from different starting points as well as looking at a hundred square to identify, discuss and start to explain the patterns we noticed. We also used a set of number cards, put them in order and then played ‘Which one is missing?’ 

This week in English our learning has been based around the story 'Supertato'; clearly a firm favourite for the children! We have been labelling the characters and using adjectives to describe Evil Pea and Supertato. We also made our own 'super veggie' and wrote a description of what our 'super veggie' looks like and their superpowers.  

Our art learning this week saw us start to learn about two of our focus artists; Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. We looked at examples of their work, discussed what we noticed and then started to create our own inspired pieces.  We used photos and crayons to create a piece of art inspired by Andy Warhol where each child had four identical pictures of themselves that they coloured using crayons. The children will make this into a collage and we look forward to sharing these pieces with you. We also used pop art style dots to show colour without filling a space completely. We looked at Lichtenstein’s “Ben Day Dots” to create a piece inspired by his theory, we have made a good start on this and will continue with it next week. 

In RE we have been looking at ‘special places’. We visited our local church and discussed what we could see and why it is important for Christians.

As our story this week was Supertato, we have been exploring floating and sinking with fruits and vegetables. We learnt what a prediction is and made predictions first before testing the fruits and vegetables. We discussed why some float and why some sink, and why some of them floated first and then sank. We then explored floating and sinking with other objects.

We also went on a superhero rescue! A villain (Evil Pea) sent a note to the children explaining that he had taken 'Ted'. The children had a series of clues to follow which they hoped would lead them to Ted. The clues were solved accurately and when they found Ted on the PE shed they had one final question to answer about the focus text we have been using this week. Great superhero problem solving everyone! Well done!

We are going to have a themed weekly 'Show and Tell' which will be on a Thursday. The theme for next week is 'A favourite place you have visited'. We will ask the children to tell us about the item/photograph and ask them a couple of questions too. The children can bring in an item from the place they have visited or a photograph or you can email any photos to me at this address: rhorn@pelyntprimary.co.uk **Please note, if you are emailing me any photos to ensure that they are sent before 8:30am on Thursday so that they are ready to show on Thursday morning, many thanks.**

Points to remember....
- As the weather warms up please ensure your child brings a drinks bottle to school each day filled with water.
- Please ensure sun cream is applied before school; we are unable to apply sun cream at school.
- Please ensure your child brings a sunhat to school. 
- Below we have attached some optional homework activities, based around our learning about Superheroes this term. The children can do as many of the activities as they wish. Please do take photos or bring the homework activities to school so we can give them house points for their amazing work! You will also be sent a copy of these home on Monday.

Class 1 Team

What lovely weather we've had this week to welcome the children back to school for the summer term! It has been wonderful to spend some time outside in our outside area and for our PE lessons. We started our new learning for this half term, our big question is 'What is a superhero?' The children are very excited about this topic!

During our maths learning this week, we were focusing on building numbers and continuing patterns beyond 10. We practiced counting to 20 using the stable order counting principle. We practiced counting both forwards and backwards. We then explored counting and building amounts and explaining what number we had built. The children were starting to notice patterns they could see e.g. ten and 1, ten and 2, ten and 3 etc. They then said that "the number after the one was going up by one each time". We will continue with this strand of learning next week where we will be further investigating pattern and verbal counting. 

In English, to introduce our new 'big question' we begun the week by looking at some very familiar superheroes and writing their names and their superpowers.  Our story this week was 'Eliot Jones, Midnight Superhero'. We wrote about the superpowers Eliot used in the story and what he used them for. We also  looked at when speech bubbles are used in stories; we then wrote some speech bubbles for the characters in the story.

In RE we have started to discuss which places are special and why. We talked about places that are special to us, for example, places to be happy, to have fun, to be quiet or to feel safe. The children came up with some lovely ideas, including, the beach, the park, the woods, the playground and their bedroom.

In PSHE we have started our unit on 'Relationships' and this week we have been looking at our families. Mrs Forbes shared a photo of her family; if any of the children would like to bring in a photo of their family to share during our PSHE circle time next week on Wednesday we would love to see them. 

Our art learning this week involved creating a piece of artwork...more information to follow soon! 

The children each took their tricky word bags home on Friday, please see the note inside which provides some more information. If you have any questions please feel free to ask. 

School photos are next Friday - please ensure all children are wearing their school uniform. 

Class 1 Team

Hello everyone

We cannot believe we have just completed the last full week of Spring term 2! Just 4 days to go next week!

We had an exciting music lesson with Mrs Butlin this week after our singing assembly. We learnt a funny duck dance and had to move like the different members of the duck family and listen carefully to when the music changed. Mrs Butlin also showed us her clarinet. She told us all about it and she played it for us, we listened carefully to the sound it made and how she moved her fingers to change the pitch.

In our maths learning this week we have started learning about 3D shapes. We started off by being able to recognise the shapes and then started to learn their names. We have learnt about these shapes: cube, cuboid, cylinder, cone, pyramid, sphere. We then started to use mathematical vocabulary to describe the properties such as all of the faces on a cube are flat. Towards the end of the week, we were finding 2D shapes within 3D shapes. We used paint to print the 3D shapes and identified which 2D shapes we could see. On Friday we were using 3D shapes for tasks where we had 3D shapes and a ramp. We had to explore which 3D shapes rolled down the ramp and which did not and then explain what we noticed about the shapes that did not roll. After that, we explored which shapes stacked and which did not, we investigated which properties made it a good shape for stacking.

In English this week our learning has been based around the story 'Katie and the Dinosaurs'. We used describing words to describe one of the scenes in the land of the dinosaurs and wrote about where we thought Katie would take Grandma at the end of the story.

In PSHE we have been discussing the importance of being clean, in particular washing our hands.  We spoke about the importance of washing our hands and then looked at how we do it properly. We discussed that we can’t always see the germs on our hands because they are invisible. We then took part in an experiment. The pepper in the water was the germs. When we put our finger in the water the pepper (germs) stuck to our finger. We then dipped our finger in soap and dipped it back into the water. The pepper (germs) moved away from our finger. This showed that germs don’t like soap and we need to use it when we wash our hands to wash the germs away.

We enjoyed going out to the forest school area looking at the pondlife. Before we went out to the pond, we discussed what we might expect to find and what pond creatures look like, we linked this to our learning about lifecycles. We then did some pond dipping where we tried to identify the pondlife using magnifying glasses to take a closer look, we were so excited to have found two newts! We looked at them in the jugs so we could take a closer look and were surprised to see all of the different colours on the newts! 

A few notes about next week:
*No PE due to Easter service on Tuesday afternoon and early school closing (after lunch) on Thursday afternoon.
*Parent consultations on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday after school – everyone has booked a slot – we look forward to meeting with you.

Class 1 Team

Hello everyone

It was great to see everyone wearing something red on Friday for Red Nose Day. We discussed what Red Nose Day is and the children asked some brilliant questions to further their understanding.

During our Maths lessons this week we were looking at composition to 10 and making bonds to 10 using 2 parts and 3 parts. We used Numicon to support our learning about parts and being able to visibly see the different bonds to 10. We ended the week by looking at doubles and finding doubles to 10. We reminded ourselves that the concept of doubling is ‘twice as many’.

We continued with our photography focus and set up our own scenes and took photographs of it. We then changed part of the scene and took another photograph and explained the changes we had made.

When we arrived at school at the beginning of the week we noticed there were dinosaur footprints in the classroom and they had taken a big bite out of one of our books and left the paper all over the floor! When we looked in the nest we saw that the eggs had hatched and  we had baby dinosaurs in the classroom! However, when we arrived in the classroom on Tuesday morning the baby dinosaurs had gone missing! We made 'Missing' posters for the baby dinosaurs and stuck them up around the school to see if anyone had seen them. We still hadn't found them, so on Thursday we made traps to try and catch them. We are really hoping we find them soon!

This week we have been looking at the size of dinosaurs and answering the question ‘were all dinosaurs big?’ We all said that we didn’t think you could fit a dinosaur in the classroom. We found out though, that although some dinosaurs were the largest ever land animals to live, some were also very tiny. We learnt that the smallest dinosaur was the Compsognathus, which was the size of a chicken! We then used unifix cubes to measure the height of three different dinosaurs and put them in order from the shortest to the tallest.

The Class 1 Team 

We’ve had an exciting week in Class 1!

On Tuesday we celebrated St Piran’s Day with a service at the church, thank you to those of you who came, we hope you enjoyed it. On Thursday we celebrated World Book Day where we had an array of characters in our classroom! We enjoyed sharing information about our characters and which story they were from and ended the day with an assembly with Rev Allen. We were also very lucky to take part in an online event with the author Rashmi Sirdeshpande. She wrote the book ‘Never Show a T-Rex a Book’. She spoke about why she became an author and why she loved her job. She read the story to us and we had the opportunity to ask her questions; Pelynt School even got a mention!

In our Maths learning this week, we continued with focusing on 9 and 10, in particular, comparing numbers to 10, representing 9 and 10 and finding 1 more and 1 less. We enjoyed listening to lots of stories linked to our learning including ‘How Do Dinosaurs Count to Ten?’, ‘One Duck Stuck’ and ‘Ten in the Bed’.

At the beginning of the week Class 1 had a very special delivery. Mrs Thompson said a treasure chest had been delivered for us. We had lots of ideas what might be inside including treasure, gold and jewels. When we opened the chest we saw some eggs. We think they might be dinosaur eggs but we’ll have to wait and see. We decided we need to build a nest for them. We watched a video of a bird building a nest and looked at all the different natural materials they used. In our writing sessions we then wrote labels and captions for the nest, including 'be careful, do not touch and take care'. We also read the story 'Dear Dinosaur' and wrote a letter to our favourite dinousar to ask them questions. 

We have been looking at what dinosaurs eat. We discussed how palaeontologists find this out by looking at bones and fossils, especially their teeth. We learnt what the words carnivore, herbivore and omnivore mean. We looked at pictures of different dinosaur teeth and found out that carnivores have sharp pointy teeth so they can eat meat and that herbivores have flat teeth or beaks so they can eat plants.

During ‘Explore and Learn’ time this week, the children have enjoyed a range of activities including being palaeontologists, creating dinosaur stomp footprints using dinosaurs, large paper and paint and being imaginative using costumes and hats for dressing up and creating stories/ games.

The Class 1 Team

Hello everyone

We continued with our photography learning in Art this week where we learnt how to take photos with an Ipad, edit these photos and print them off before writing about the edits we had made to our original photo. We decided to take photos of natural objects such as plants and trees.

In PE we carried on with our movements and dance which is inspired by ‘The Three Little Pigs’. This week we focused on remembering movement actions and changing our speed. We all experimented with making different actions and gestures as the pigs and wolf characters.

We finished our maths learning about time this week where we sequenced the days of the week and created a timetable to show events that take place on each day. We then started to explore numbers 9 and 10. The children used 1:1 correspondence to count a set of 9 and then 10 items with accuracy. They then sorted different representations of 9 and 10 into a table. The representations were made up of numerals, words and pictures of individual objects.

In English we have been reading the story 'Mad about Dinosaurs'. We learnt what rhyming words were and looked at the rhyming pattern in the story. We came up with our own rhyming words and used these to write rhyming sentences about dinosaurs. We designed our own pet dinosaurs and wrote sentences about the features of our pet dinosaur.

We have been learning about what dinosaurs looked like and how we know. We learnt that we don't have photos of dinosaurs, just drawings, and these are guesses about what they looked like. We can only guess at what dinosaurs looked like by looking very closely at the clues left behind such as bones and fossils. We compared the skeleton of a dinosaur to a human dinosaur and discussed the similarities and differences. 

In PSHE we have been understanding how moving and resting are good for our bodies. We took part in different challenges outside and discussed what happened to our bodies including our heart beating faster, our skin feeling hotter and breathing faster.

Class 1 Team

It was great to welcome the children back after half term, we hope everybody had a wonderful week.

Let's have a look at some of the things we have been learning this week...

In Maths we started our learning about length, height and time which we will continue with next week. We started off with developing our understanding of length and introduced vocabulary such as ‘long’ and ‘longest’ and ‘short’ and ‘shortest’ that we can use to describe objects. We used playdough to understand that some materials can be changed by stretching them to make them longer. We ensured that we lined the ends up so that we could see the difference in length and then used some of the vocabulary to describe them accurately. The next day, we read Jim and the Beanstalk by Raymond Briggs. Our aim was to be able to use more specific vocabulary to describe an object as ‘longer than’ or ‘shorter than’ something else. We made indirect comparisons using non-standard objects (cubes) to measure items. Everybody cut some string to make worms of different lengths and used cubes to measure and compare their length.

Our Art focus for this half term is photography. We started off by discussing what photography is, the equipment that can be used and how it has changed over time. We researched four photographers: Karl Blossfeldt, Edward Weston, Adrian Langdon and Cathy Rhodes. We identified what sort of things they each liked to photograph and made comparisons. 

Class 1 Team

Happy Half Term!

We have had a great Spring term 1 in Class 1 together. We just wanted to say a big thank you for all of your support whether it be reading with your child at home, attending 'Family Friday' or the class assembly, we how know valuable this is, so thank you. 

This week we had a focus around Chinese New Year in some of our learning activities. In art, we made our own paper lanterns and Chinese dragons. Some of the children also used tissue paper to create their own lantern and some made a dragon head collage where they had to cut and stick different shapes. 

In Maths we were continuing our learning about 6, 7 and 8. We started the week off by finding and making pairs and developing our understanding of odd and even. We then progressed to finding and making doubles to 8. 

During our outdoor learning session we were spotting signs of winter/spring and anything that we thought was different/ interesting. We worked in pairs to use the iPad to take photos of things we had spotted, we then took a selfie so we knew who had taken which photos!  

Have a great half term and we look forward to seeing you all on Monday 19th February.

Class 1 Team

Hello everyone 
We just wanted to start off by saying how proud we are of every child in Class 1 for their hard work this half term and the effort they have been putting into their learning. We loved sharing our class assembly with the rest of the school and our parents/ carers. 

This week in Maths our theme was ‘Growing 6, 7 and 8’. We were finding and representing 6, 7 and 8, finding one more/less than 6, 7 and 8 and looking at the numbers we could see within them. 

In English our learning has been about the story 'Aliens Love Underpants'. The children particularly enjoyed this story and found it very funny! We've enjoyed sequencing the story and telling the story in our own words. We had lots of fun using our imaginations when designing and drawing our own aliens and writing a description of our alien.

In music we listened to ‘Conga’ by Miami Sound Machine and identified the instruments we could hear. We also discussed the genre of music and made comparisons to songs we have listened to previously. We then got the instruments out and had fun playing them to see the different things we could do with them. Everybody took it in turns to play a rhythm on their instrument and the rest of us had to copy it on our own instrument. 

We had a bit of a shock when we came in from playtime to find a mess on our carpet! There was a letter and when we opened it, it was from the aliens who told us they had been flying over Earth and had dropped lots of objects from their spaceship. They told us they wanted us to give them back the magnetic objects and left us some magnets. We used the magnets to test the objects to see which were magnetic and which were not magnetic. We then sorted them into two different hoops and discussed what materials they were made out of. After we had fun exploring with lots of different types of magnets.

Our PE lesson on Thursday was filled with excitement as we got the large climbing equipment out in the hall! The children all demonstrated consideration for themselves and others in order to keep everyone safe. They used their gross motor skills to navigate the equipment showing good co ordination and control. 

Please note there will be no Family Friday next week as it is INSET Day. School finishes on Thursday 8th February and we look forward to welcoming you back on Monday 19th February after the half term break. 

The Class 1 Team 

We have had a great week in Class 1, especially with it being Maths Enrichment week too! 

Let's tell you just some of what we've been up to! 

As we have already mentioned, it was Maths Enrichment week where we took part in and completed lots of different activities including a whole school piece of artwork based on Kandinsky's concentric circles. We explored a range of texts, including 'One is a Snail, Ten is a Crab' and 'The Greedy Triangle'. We used playdough and straws to create animals with different amounts of legs and then wrote a number sentence to represent them. We also made a triangle out of four smaller triangles and learnt about how many sides different shapes have. We would also like to thank Class 4 for putting on a brilliant shape themed treasure hunt, we had a great time working with the children in Class 4 and solving the clues together.

We also continued our White Rose maths learning where we were focusing on mass and capacity. We used balance scales to compare mass and find a balance. First of all we held two items and then made a prediction about which item we thought would be the heaviest. We then checked using the balance scales. We started to develop our understanding of comparative terms such as heavy, heavier than, heaviest, light, lighter than and lightest. Towards the end of the week we moved on to learning about capacity. We used rice, sand and water to explore the capacity of different containers. We then made direct comparisons by pouring from one container to another.

This week we have been learning all about the planets in our solar system. We learnt all their names and learnt about some of their properties including, which planet is the largest and smallest and which are the hottest and coldest. We then learnt the order of the planets, starting with which one is the closest to the sun and going all the way to the planet furthest from the sun. We each had our own planet and had to work together to stand in the correct order. We then practised our cutting skills when cutting out all the planets and sticking them in the correct order. 

In Art we had fun with shaving foam and food colouring! We used a pipette to drop food colouring onto some shaving foam before mixing it with a skewer. We then laid our piece of card on top and then scraped off the excess foam to create some beautiful patterns. We hope to turn them in to planets! We also experimented with food colouring and oil. We used a pipette to drop the food colouring/ oil mix into some water and then laid our card on top. When we picked the card up we had some interesting patterns. We look forward to seeing our artwork once they are completely dry. 

Next week there will be no Family Friday as we hope to see you for our Class assembly.

The Class 1 Team

Reminders
*Class 1 assembly - Friday 2nd February at 2:30pm. 
*Please ensure reading books and reading records come to school on Mondays so we can change books.