St Joseph's

In our history we have been learning about the Tudor Era and last week we finished off making our Tudor homes. We compared them to present day houses and labelled the features onto our plans and evaluated our finished models.

We learnt about the religion Judaism. The children made Challah bread and wrote instructions of how they did it. They also made dreidels using salt dough. We also looked at the special symbol of The Star of David and made stain glass windows. The children loved learning about Judaism and comparing it to our faith.

This week, we went on a bear hunt in the playground for one of our English lessons. Mrs Smith was the bear and the children had to describe how the bear moved through each setting in the story as he followed the children. They all loved acting out the story and came up with some fantastic words such as boom, boom, smash, crash and crunch, crunch.

This past week, some of the children have been looking at 2-D and 3-D shapes. They went on a hunt with Mrs Mcphail, sorted shapes and made repeating patterns with them. We are so impressed with your knowledge this week, excellent work!

On Wednesday a Victorian school teacher came in and as a class we took part in different activities. First we looked at different Victorian toys and we really enjoyed it. The children discovered that some of the toys were quiet tricky but kept trying and got better at playing with them. Then we explored leaves and flowers and drew a still life drawing of them using parchment paper and pencils. Afterwards, we took part in some Victorian ring games on the playground, I taught them in and out the shading bluebells and we did the hokey pokey. Finally in the afternoon, we went the teacher who we had to call Miss. Some of the children were a bit worried before meeting her but by the end they loved it. We wrote on slates with chalk, we recited our alphabet and wrote with ink and pen too. We learnt a lot about Victorian children and schools.

It has been lovely to have all of our children back in. We got creative at the start of the week and made story maps of the story 'We're going on a bear hunt'. The children wrote captions from the story onto them too. We also acted out the full story which we all really enjoyed. Year 2 have been learning about 3D shapes and Year 1 have explored mass and how to weigh using a balance.

It was a great day last Thursday, the children were so creative with their costumes and we read quite a few stories that were brought in. The children made a wanted poster for Robin Hood which we learnt about all last week in our phonics lessons. Well done to Charlotte and George too who got a certificate for the best costumes.

Here are my favourite five books from Autumn 1

The children dressed up as some amazing heroes and were able to explain why their hero was important to them. They enjoyed taking part in the parade and seeing all of the other classes. Well done St Peter's

The children worked with Mrs McKee to create a bonfire and firework scene. They talked about the colours and used the media of oil pastels to look at smudging the colours to blur and mix them together.

As a class we role played in groups how we should look after God's World and the creatures that are within it. The group pictured below are showing how people sometimes do not look after small creatures such as spiders, but then acted out making the right choice in placing the spider outside. Other groups role-played cutting down trees as making the wrong choice and then by planting more to make the right choice.

In maths the past week, the Year One children looked at splitting numbers in different ways by using the part-whole model. At the end of the week they began solving addition calculations. The Year Two children used the part-whole model to look at addition fact families by changing the order of the numbers to make different calculations.

As a class we explored the four compass points. we then planned a route suing the compass points to travel to the mugger. The children were brilliant at identifying North, East, South and West.

The children went on a walk around school with Mrs Mcphail to find all of the beautiful things that God has created for us. We made I wonder statements about them, such as I wonder why the sky is blue, I wonder why God made trees, I wonder why he made all of the stars. The children then answered their own and other children's I wonder statements.

Everyone in the class made a plate to resemble one of the days from the creation story. We then ordered the story as well.