As geographers, this week we were lucky enough to spend time exploring our local area, in particular Dartmoor National Park. After learning that we live very close to a National Park it was the perfect place to spend time practicing our navigation skills, using a compass to locate all four cardinal points and providing opportunities to discuss our location using positional language. 
The trip to Dartmoor enabled us to embed our knowledge of the human and physical features of our local area, spotting them on route and whilst we were there. This will support us next week when we begin to explore how to draw and identify key features on a map. 

As athletes we had our first session of cricket with Jonny from Chance to Shine. We started our sessions by exploring how to hold the bat correctly and using aim to direct the ball. Jonny was super impressed by our brilliant listening skills and our efforts when exploring the movements he'd taught us. 

After learning about the importance of soup kitchens through our English text 'Last stop on Market Street' the children in Class One requested to host their own soup kitchen as an act of kindness to our local community. 

As writers we created invitations to our event, these were shared around our local community and using social media. 

With the help of Queenies we then peeled, chopped, cooked and blended three tasty soups. We used our group work skills to work together and encouraged one another when finding particular aspects challenging. 

We then hosted our soup kitchen at our local community hall, due to Coronavirus it meant that our guests were only allowed to call in to collect their soup before sitting outside to enjoy our beautiful views. However, we were super excited to see everyone that called in and paid us a visit. We hope that in the future we will able to host another event. Thank you to everyone who came.  

We enjoyed a visit from a volunteer who helps run Tavistock foodbank. We learnt about all the work they do to provide food, baby and pet supplies to people in our community who need help and support. We learnt about how you need to get a voucher to get a food parcel from the food bank and that most food parcels are designed to last three day. Whilst playing a pack a food parcel game in the playground we noticed that all of the foods are 'long life'-nonperishable. This means that people can keep them and use them as and when they need to. We also learnt were you can donate food to in our local area and hope to be able to do this soon. 

As scientist we were excited to start our new theme 'Healthy Me'. As a warm up for our first lesson we used our pattern seeking skills to explore whether most satsumas really do have 10 segments inside. We found this to be false, identifying that most had one or two less than ten. We will continue to explore different experiments throughout these lessons enabling us to use different types of scientific enquiry. 

This led us into our main learning exploring how we stay healthy and our basic needs for survival. We were confident in identifying that as humans we need food, air and water to survive. We also discussed that happiness is an important part of staying health. 

Welcome back! Class One first week has had an incredibly busy first week of Summer Term. 

This week as writers we have started to explore our new writing unit based on the text 'Last Stop on Market Street' by Matt De La Pena. Listen to the story here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk6CWvW_5-s. We have explored retelling the story through role play and sequencing the story creating our own story map. 

We are intrigued by this story as it explores diversity. We are all super excited to learn about what a soup kitchen is and to hopefully host our own. Our home corner is currently a soup kitchen for us to explore, creating soups and writing menus. 

As mathematicians in Year One we have started to explore 'multiplication and division' recapping our existing knowledge of counting in 2s, 5s and 10s before moving onto using objects to create equal groups. In Reception we have started to explore 'Finding my pattern' we have spent the first week recapping our subitising, counting from a larger group and comparing numbers to 10 skills. 

As engineers we have started exploring healthy eating with our final piece to design and make a healthie smoothie. For our first lesson, Queenies supported in us learning about how make identify the difference between a fruit and a vegetable. We also explored how fruits can add natural sugars to some food such as yoghurt making it sweeter. We had lots of fun exploring the different fruits and mixing them with yogurt to see if they changed the taste. 

As geographers we have started our new theme 'Where is Mary Tavy?' by recapping our understanding of the United Kingdom and its four countries. We were brilliant at naming all of the four countries in the United Kingdom and could even remember the names of some of their capital cities. During our 'busy time' we spent some time using our construction and natural resources to build some of the famous landmarks you could see when visiting our capital city, London. 

As mathematicians we were enthused to explore the concept of number lines. We enjoyed drawing our number lines on the playground, counting forwards and backwards in steps of ones,twos, fives and tens. Later in the week we used our step counting to support us when exploring addition and subtraction on number lines. 

Class One enjoyed celebrating British Science Week and completed various activities celebrating 'Innovation for the future'. Our imaginations went wild when innovating a new machine or robot and we thought of some brilliant ideas from robots who taught us how to dance to machines that shoot paint. We enjoyed watching farm live and were fascinated when watching a hatchling breaking its way out of an egg, following this we designed incubators ensuring they enabled the fertilised eggs to survive by keeping the air warm. 

We also explored how chocolate changed state when warmed and became a liquid. This helped us when creating our 'Crunchy Architecture', our designs and results were incredible and we understand that the chocolate needs to return to a solid before it would be stable enough to hold any of the biscuits in place. 

Finally we enjoyed investigating our ice garden, exploring the different types of flowers and insects that were hidden within. 

As part of our new theme 'London's Burning', Class One went back in time to Sunday 2nd September 1666 to explore the Great Fire of London. 

We explored London during this era and noticed lots of differences compared to now, learnt lots of interesting facts about the fire, painted pictures of the ferocious flames and made gingerbread with Mrs Stacey, our school cook. 

All the children enjoyed exploring our new home corner based on 'Thomas Farriners' bakery, as well as creating salt dough treats to go in the bakery and completing some fabulous writing.