Wrlands Excitement

Yesterday was our trip to the Wetlands centre in Barnes as part of our science topic on plants and growing.

It was a very hot day and I was pleased that we managed to get water bottles and hats for every child. In this weather it is an essential for our children! Please remember this for our sports day tomorrow as it is not safe to take them out of school without a sun hat and a water bottle. We simply don't have spares so please make sure your child has them!

It was a lovely trip and we enjoyed pond dipping. We discovered lots of different insects - some of them were so small we needed a magnifying glass to see them. We also had lots of fun in the explorer section - some children got very wet! Just what we needed to cool down.

There were lots of ducks around - we especially enjoyed watching the baby ones play in the water. We also got very excited when they came out of the water and walked along the path beside us!

Ask your child what they learnt yesterday. We will be writing a postcard to Barnaby Bear about our adventures which your child will be bringing home soon so question them then!

Another small reminder - school packed lunches are always the sun - cheese and tuna so if you know your child does not like these sandwich fillings please make sure they have a home packed lunch.

Barnaby Bear travels to Gateway!

Hello, welcome back after our half term break. I hope you all had a good holiday and are enjoying the lovely sunshine we are having. Fingers crossed it will last! This final half term in Year 1 our Geography project is 'Where in the world is Barnaby Bear.' The children have all been giving a mini Barnaby and a pack of information about how we can share our Barnaby adventures on Fronter. We will also be taking home a class book and are asking for the children to take photos of their adventures with Barnaby each night and write a little paragraph explaining your fun activities. We would like every child to really get involved with this project so please see me if you have any questions regarding taking photos. Your child does not have to be in them, it is Barnaby we are focusing on!

We would also like for you to bring in your holiday photos of different places around the world. I will scan these in for children to look at in their Geography lessons. It makes it more exciting for them if they are discussing places they have already been to. We are trying to get as many different countries covered in this topic as we can so please help us!

Barnaby also has his own website that we will be using in class but some children expressed an interest in looking at it at home so here is the link!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/barnabybear/

Next week we are looking at the continents of the world - a very brief introduction to give us an idea about how the world is made up. We will be using globes in lessons and looking at some maps but if you would like a sneaky peak before next week here are some games you could play!

http://www.playkidsgames.com/games/continentNames/default.htm

This is for the kids to name the continents and try and test themselves! They will not be looking in too much detail so don't get too anxious. This is something they will revisit in Geography throughout primary school!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/teachers/keystage_1/games/geography1.shtml

This covers lots of the activities we will be doing over the next couple of weeks and mostly of them are linked to Barnaby! Ask your child what they learnt today in their Geogrpahy lesson. Can they tell you where Barnaby comes from?

On Friday we will be going to Regents Park in the afternoon with the rest of Year 1 as part of our Science topic of growing. Please make sure your child takes hayfever medicine in the moring if they need it, put on suncream or bring a hat etc if the weather is nice!

Super spellers!

This week our super spellers are:

Jahed, Obade, Mahirah, Zareen, Hanifah, Eddie, Rahatour, Jone Sheng, Amir, Imran, Hajer, Hassan, Astrit and Maryum.

Well done children!

Trip to the Geoffrye Museum

Last Thursday, 1 Peach went to the Geoffrye Museum and we all had a brilliant time. We learnt so much about old Victorian homes. We were lucky enough to have Mr Rossington there who gave us lots of information about how people used to have to do their washing and ironing and how people used to live.

Can your child name all these different items and what they were used for?

As we got there a little early, we walked around the herb garden and had fun smelling all the different plants and guessing what they were. The lemon was very fresh!

We really enjoyed pretending to be young ladies and gentlemen!

We were lucky enough to have a workshop as well. Lots of us knew that there wasn't electricity and we were good at finding other light sources such as the candles and oil lamp. We talked a lot about the types of entertainment there would be within a house. Ask your child for their ideas.... there were some wild and wonderful ones!

Super spellers

This week our super spellers are:
Jahed, Maryum, Sawsan, Bilal, Astrit, Hassan, Hajer, Jone Sheng, Hamza, Yahia, Eddie and Zareen.
Well done children!

Super Spellers!

This week's super spellers are: Naim, Astrit, Zareen, Yasmin, Hamza, Rahatour, Mahirah, Hassan, Maryum, Obade, Mehenaz, Jone Sheng, Eddie and Jahed. Well done children!

Nearly there are: Yahia, Hanifah, Hajer, Sawsan, Amir and Isa!

Please make sure your children learn their spellings every week. It is also a good idea to look at previous week's spellings to make sure they have remembered those and can still spell them! The children use these words all the time in their work not just for a spelling test!

Yahia won the Golden Award this week for always working hard. What a lovely reason to get an award.

Just a quick reminder that 1 Peach are going on their trip to the Geoffrye Museum this Thursday! A big thank you to all the parents who have paid their £2 donation. We are all very excited.

Here is a link to the website if you wanted to find out more about what the children will be seeing and doing on their visit.

http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk/

The weather has unfortunately gone quite miserable again. Please make sure your child has their coat!

Literacy this week!

Welcome back after the holidays, I hope everyone enjoyed the break! I can't quite believe we are already in our summer term! The year is just flying by.

It has been an exciting return to school especially for our Literacy lessons as we have been lucky enough to have two visits in two days!

Yesterday we had a puppet show, the Lucky Gingerbread man from the Magic Book theatre. It was excellent and the children enjoyed themselves immensely, especially as they all know the story so well! We are looking forward to making some of the puppets we saw yesterday especially the newspaper puppets. They are so easy to make and hopefully will create hours of fun.

All of the puppets were made out of easily accessed materials such as wooden spoons from the kitchen and scourers etc.

My favourite activity was when we got into pairs and became Pinocchio and the puppet master. One person (the puppet master) had to lead the other (Pinocchio) in his movements. The children were amazing at looking carefully and copying movements.

We have some videos of the day which will be playing each morning at the start of the day so do come in and see what happened! Here is an extract of part of the show.

We have been studying non-fiction texts for three weeks now and on Monday began our big topic of creating an interactive non-fiction text on machines. We were lucky enough to have HSS, a hire company, come in with some of their machines and tools and explain how they work and what they are used for.

We used our science brains to think about why we would need ear defenders when using some of the machines. Hugh is sitting here on the dump truck. He answered all our questions.

The children came up with some amazing questions and lots of them enjoyed sitting on the dumper truck! There were lots of new and tricky words to add to our vocabulary, the teachers learnt lots of new words today as well!

Over the next two weeks we will be creating an information book about machines as a class and in groups. 1 Peach have already begun their book, we are calling it 'Machine Detectives' which Hamza thought of.

This is a pebble dasher and is used on walls of houses. We asked lots of questions about this machine especially as most of us weren't sure what pebbles were.

Ask your child what other machines and tools they saw today!

This is a metal locator. This is used to check there are no electric cables before drilling into the ground. We liked the noise it made to warn us when something was metal.

Next week we have another trip... come back for more details soon!