Welcome to Year 1 and 2

Hello Year 1 and 2 and welcome back to school. Also a big hello to your mummies and daddies who I hope to meet soon at our meet the teacher evening (date to follow). I hope you have all had a lovely summer and I  can't wait to find out more about what you have been doing so don't forget to bring your scavenger boxes back to school next week so we can find out what you have collected this summer and we can spend time decorating them too. Mum's and dad's have you remembered to do you homework too? Your hopes and dreams for your children will be a fantastic display in our classroom and your children will enjoy sharing them with their new friends so send them in as soon as you can, it will be fantastic to see how creative you have all been. I will be sending home notes and letters to keep you informed about your child's learning and a homework sheet for this half term. I have put lots of information about reading in your child's reading journal so have a look through when you get the opportunity. I will try to BLOG as often as I can so you can see the fun activities we  have been doing, our creations and keep you informed about the fun experiences coming up. Please do come and talk to me if you have any questions or worries and I will happily talk things through with you. If you are unable to come in to talk because of work commitments  please leave a message with the office and I will call you back.

Up our street

Our new topic for the Summer term is Up our street will help us to learn all about  the village our school is in Uppermill and the villages around us. We will carry on learning about Ghana an African country that produced Cocoa and compare how people live there with how we live in Uppermill. We will also be comparing Uppermill to life at the seaside resorts around England.

On Tuesday we spent the day at Castleshaw. We developed our team working skills taking part in different activities and challenges. We had a fantastic day and wrote amazing details recounts about our trip.

We have worked very hard on our first homework challenge and we have created leaflets about the places we live or the village we go to school in. We were very creative and displayed the information very creatively. This is Isabel F she has really thought about what information people would like to know about Uppermill and has made her leaflet very colourful and the information stand out.

With Mrs. Andrews help we have created our own recycled rainbow. It looks very bright, colourful and makes the pond area look more interesting. Look at the different things we have used from our recycling bins at home. We organised them into different colours to create the rainbow.

We have been working hard in Maths pretending to be Wizards making potions. We have followed spells and cred the potion measuring out the different ingredients using jugs and funnels. We also created our own potions and had to work out the quantities of each of the ingredients we were adding to our potion.

Lots of children have worked hard on this weeks homework finding out facts about Sunflowers. They have presented their work very creatively.

We have made fantastic sculptures using old CD's. Mrs. Andrew snapped all the CD's into small sections, with strong glue we attached them to the  outline shape. Mrs. Andrew made them waterproof by painting several coats of varnish onto them. We created a frog, fish and heron to go near our school pond. They look amazing and shine in the sunshine. They make our pond area look more interesting.

For this week's homework we have been researching African Animals and have written our own non-fiction books for other people to read and find out more about the types of animals that live in Africa.
We have presented the information very creatively to make sure our booklets stand out  on a book shelf in a library.

Holly H has made a bird box for our school garden. Holly has worked hard with her dad to make a wooden bird box, she used the saw and hammer to cut and join the wood together. She painted it white and then added her own pictures and design.

Phoebe has made a bird feeder out of an old coke bottle. She has used wooden spoons to create stands for the birds to perch on and the spoons act as a scoop for the seed to fall down on to so the birds can eat it. She also created her own fat balls too.

Thank you girls this will definitely encourage birds to come into our school garden.

We had a fantastic time today developing our art skills. We walked down into Uppermill and using our view finders we chose a section of the river to sketch, some of us decided to draw pots and pans up on the hill behind the optitons. We remembered our topic is focusing on comparing Uppermill to villages in Ghana so we chose things to sketch that we would not see in Ghana We  developed our sketching skills and remembered to use drawing techniques such as tone, texture and shading.

We enjoyed drawing real things and would really like to do activities like this again.

We read the story Handa's Surprise and wrote fantastic character descriptions of Handa thinking about her appearance and personality. We looked at the African patterns on the title page of the book and used the internet to find out about the repeating and symmetrical patterns on the clothes people wear in Africa. We created our own colourful, repeating and symmetrical patterns and transferred this onto a tile before using a roller to apply the paint and printing the pattern on a huge board.

Look at the amazing camouflaged pictures we have created using the patterns from the animals skin.

We have been looking at traditions in Ghana in Africa. We have found out that African people love to sing and dance and will do tribal dancing with their faces and bodies painted. Look at the masks we have created they show the tradition painting on peoples faces. We have created lots of patterns making sure the face is symmetrical. 

This week is Britain and Beyond week throughout school. We have started today by looking at Great Britain and talking about the values we hold as a nation. We all thought carefully about the different values we think are important and chose one of them to hang on our thinking tree. We had to think about why the value we had chosen was the most important value to have.

We have been learning all about African music and have worked hard to learn how to play shakers, wooden and metal percussion instruments, rain makers and Djembe drums. We created different beats and created our own way to record the music on paper so the rest of the class could read the music and play different instruments.

Look at us learning to dance to African music. We learnt that we need to move our bodies to the beat taking care to move our arms at the same or opposite time to our feet. We crouched down low, danced on our own and with a partner. We noticed that the dance repeated itself during the chorus. We think the dance was telling us a story about people falling out because you faced your partner and them moved away.

We have been comparing England to Ghana thinking about the weather, the clothes people wear, the music, the food they eat and the houses they live in. We created our own poster to show the comparisons.

We also created our own postcards to show what we have learnt about Ghana.

We have been looking at maps of the world and learning where different countries  are. We can  identify England and the other countries in Great Britain and Ghana in Africa. We have also been learning about the seven continents. Look at us playing Geography twister, it really helped  us to understand where the continents are.

We have done some art work using pastels looking at Dove stones in Uppermill and the village of Kumasi in Ghana. We looked at birds eye views of the two places and discussed the differences in colour, shape, pattern and texture.