As writers, the children have thoroughly enjoyed being immersed in one of our favourite texts 'Owl Babies' by Martin Waddell. The year one and two children are familiar with this text as its a favourite from our Pie Corbett Reading Spine.

At the start of our sequence the children created acrostic poems focusing on the setting of owl babies, all pupils strived to use interesting vocabulary within their poetry. 

We have also explored producing missing poster using adjectives to describe mother owl. The year two pupils explored using synonyms to ensure our adjectives offer the best description possible. 

Our pupils enjoyed using features of a letter when creating a response to a letter they received from Bill. Before moving onto retelling the story, creating zigzag books. 

The children are looking forward to creating information leaflets about owls, researching facts and presenting their findings to an audience. 

As mathematicians, Class One have continued to explored place value. Our year one pupils have explored representing numbers to 20 using concrete resources as well as pictorially. Our year two pupils have represented numbers to 100 and beyond, using various concrete resources. They have also explored partitioning numbers using hundred, tens and ones. Both year groups have explored using number lines to represent numbers and for counting on. Our EYFS pupils have explored recognising and representing numerals, using a variety of manipulatives to support their learning. 

As scientists our EYFS pupils have tilled flowers in our outside area and are tending to them. All of our pupils have also explored identifying and naming parts of the human body and the five senses. They thoroughly enjoyed investigating whether removing one of our senses made the remaining four senses stronger. 

As geographers the children have enjoyed exploring the seven continents and five oceans. They have applied there knowledge of the seven continents when exploring where bananas are grown and how they are exported to the United Kingdom. 

We have had a brilliant start to our academic year and all of the pupils have settled into school amazingly, especially our new EYFS pupils. 
 

As mathematicians we have started to explore number and place value, familiarising ourselves with the manipulatives we use to support our learning. As authors we enjoyed celebrating Ronald Dahl day, we celebrated by immersing ourselves in the text ‘The Enormous Crocodile’, year one and two created wanted posters using interesting adjectives before learning how to draw the enormous crocodile. Our EYFS pupils worked collaboratively to create an enormous crocodile, developing their gluing skills whilst doing so.

As scientists, Class One have started the term by exploring plants. Our first lesson explored what plants need to grow, we learnt that plants need water, sunlight and soil. To explore what would happen if a plant had one of these variables removed and observed how the plant changed over a week. We noticed that plant A that had water, soil and sunlight grew into a healthy plant with long roots a healthy stem and green leaves. Plant B had sunlight and soil but no water, we noticed that this plant had tried to sprout roots but nothing else had grown. Plant C had soil and water but no sunlight, this plant had grown roots but had yellow leaves. We have also learnt the names of the parts of a plants, identifying what each part does to support growth and reproduction. 

As mathematicians, Class One, are exploring place value. We have investigated counting forwards and backwards, starting and ending on different numbers. Using a hundred square to support us when discussing numbers and partitioning numbers. All of our learning has been supported by the use of manipulatives, for some activities we have represented hundreds, tens and ones using food which we were particularly fond of. 

As engineers we have continued exploring coding. We started by exploring what coding is and practiced creating simple codes using code cards before moving onto completing simple coding programs. This week we have continued to explore more complex coding programs, using block coding and debugging coding errors.  

As scientists we have continued with our studies exploring healthy me, this week we have been discussing the healthy eating. We confidently sorted foods into healthy and unhealthy groups before looking in detail at the 5 main food groups. We have developed our understanding of the nutritional benefits our bodies gain from eating each food group. This enquiry supported us in designing our own healthy meals. 

This led us to discussing the snacks we consume between meals, many of us have a snack after school to top up our energy levels. We created pictograms of our favourite snacks, analysing the results, before measuring how much sugar was in some of our favourite snacks. We were shocked to see the amounts of sugar of some of our favourites including chocolate chip cookies and coke. 

As mathematicians Class One are exploring fractions. We started our week with some hands on, practical investigations finding a half of shapes and foods. We have some previous knowledge of fractions which we applied superbly to our investigations, impressing our teacher immensely. 

As we have progressed through the week we have explored creating a whole, finding half of shapes and objects, finishing the week finding half of different quantities. Today when exploring finding half of quantities, we were excellent at spotting patterns in our answers. We have worked really hard at using mathematical language when reasoning. 

We have another busy week in Class One, we have been working hard. 
As writers we have finished our writing unit based on ‘Last Stop on Market Street’ producing a new story based on the theme of kindness. We have all enjoyed this text and have made a fantastic effort at applying the knowledge and skills that we learnt into our final write. 
After we finished our final write the children requested that we continue with our kindness theme by writing letters to our parents and carers to ask for donations for the local Foodbank who kindly visited us back in April. 
 

As mathematicians we have completed our unit on multiplication and division, which leads us nicely into fractions. In our final week, we have been exploring grouping and sharing objects into equal groups. This allowed us to develop our skills of using imagery for representation as well as continuing to develop our reasoning skills. 
 

As geographers we have explored aerial photographs of our local area, using the images to identify the human and physical features. We were brilliant at locating all of the well known features such as the Coronation Hall, the war memorial and our school, this also supported us in finding some of our homes. 
 

As scientists we have been discussing the importance of exercise and how it helps us in staying healthy. We had lots of great ideas as to why exercise is important and enjoyed investigating the effects that it has on our body. We are currently keeping an exercise diary to see which exercise we enjoy the most and which has the most impact on our bodies. 
 

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.