After a lovely rest over the Christmas holidays the year one children came back full of enthusiasm to get back into learning and finding out what topics we are doing this half term.
We had a class discussion about our favourite part of the Christmas holidays, I was delighted to find out it wasn't just all about the presents. The children were very thankful for the time they spent with their family and enjoyed eating lots of delicious food. We also agreed that we were very lucky to have received presents from family, friends and especially Father Christmas. So to show our appreciation the children wrote thank you letters for their favourite gift.
Abigail was very grateful for her puppet bag and told us how she enjoyed performing puppet shows with her cousins in Wales.
Gwennie loves her new desk, she's looking forward to doing her homework on it. Looks like I'll need to set more so she has more of an excuse to spend time on it.
Anna wanted to thank her Nanna and Nannu for her speaking bear that she loves squeezing very hard.
Estelle told me all about her baby born doll that she's going to take special care of because it means so much to her.
We started our new unit in maths of addition. We looked at adding on ten to any number. Griff, Ryan and Owen found out that if you add on ten you "just go down in a line on the 100 square."
Then we began to look at materials, Rachel defines it as "materials are what things are made of."
We explored a variety of different objects and tried to identify what each item was made of, what its material was. Here are some of the materials we named.
Some metal hoops.
A leather purse.
A piece of wool carpet.
A tower of plastic blocks.
We will continue to look at materials and their properties and think about which materials will be the most suitable for making houses or other structures out of.
Our science topic is linked in with DT this term. The children will be making structures, concentrating on planning to build structures that are strong. We explored what we could make by connecting straws.
"My bike wheels around really fast like this."
"Can we try to make the biggest tower?"
"Look at my glasses."
"We built a helicopter."
"My spider has 8 legs."
"I made an umbrella to keep dry"
In assembly we continued to observe the progress of Major Tim Peake, a British astronaut. Afterwatching his spaceship blast off on his way to the international space station before Christmas, it was about time we checked up on how he was doing.
We found out that he had arrived safely and was adapting to life at zero gravity "that means he can float around" (Archie). This morning the pupils of Sandringham School made history by contacting the astronaut on the space station. You can read more about it and watch videosby following this link - www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35261160 . We willcatch up with him again, next week when he plans to take a spacewalk.
This inspired us to write a mini report about the event, whilst focussing on capital letters and full stops.
I would also like to welcome a new member to the class, Ava. You should be very proud of how warm and welcoming your children are to new pupils, showing them how friendly Sandridge school is.
