Summer 2025
Summer, Sea and Sunshine - Week 5
We have really enjoyed beginning our final theme of the year and have busily been making our classroom into the sea with fish swimming on the windows! We have enjoyed beginning our Drawing Club Book ' The Rainbow Fish' and using really impressive words like 'radiant' , 'shimmering', 'vain' 'mesmerizing' and 'selfish' - we even remembered the word 'flamboyant' from our 'Hungry Caterpillar' story so perhaps we might be able to show you some of the actions we use to remember these wow words. We have continued lots of shape and pattern work in maths and as well as all our sea craft inside and outside and we have loved our new role play 'The Ice Cream Parlour'.
In Understanding the World it has been the perfect topic to think about the sea and and in RE we have been thinking about special places.
We have of course continues our music, singing and loved beginning cricket this term.
Lots of fun for our first week back.
Off to a cricketing start to the final half term
It was so lovely to welcome everyone back this morning. We all started the term with gusto with reading from the get go and enthusiastically began our 'Rainbow Challenges' too. Our Red challenge this week was to share and discuss our half term holiday news so a great way to catch up with everyone developing our speaking and listening skills.
We were very excited to see that our classroom had started to change into a summer sea theme with the highlight being the Ice Cream Parlour! We continued our learning with 2D shapes by composing 2D shapes and we also began our new story of the week 'The Rainbow Fish'. We did really well acting out of super seven words of the week.
Our additional treats were beginning our transition time with Year 1 as each week we will be doing cricket with Tom as part of this process. Then in the afternoon, with the help of Mrs Ellis, we began painting the classroom to look like its under the sea!
What a lot of fun for the first day back.
A happy end to a very speedy Half term!
We have loved continuing our 'Oi Frog' adventures this week cumulating in creating our very own 'Oi Frog' zig zag books - what a great effort! We are developing our speedy reading whenever possible and with our penultimate phonics check this week we will really be focusing on what we need to master before we finish the EYFS next half term.
In maths we have enjoyed recapping 2D shapes and then thinking how to arrange, position and order them. It has been wonderful to create so many pictures using them which is great for our spatial reasoning, problem solving and even communication and language to describe them. Then there has been lots of arty, crafty, games and thinking and learning in our 'play to learn' time too and so many of us have worked hard to complete all our 'Rainbow Challenges' as well!
Well done, Alnwick Castle Class - enjoy a happy half term
VE Day - Thursday 8th May
What a special day we had celebrating the 80th Anniversary of VE Day.
We came together as a whole EYFS to discuss what VE Day is, we heard the announcement of Winston Churchill, we looked at pictures and clips and discussed what it must have felt like. We then went outside to sing some old fashioned songs and were then collected by a buddy from Bamburgh Castle Class to go for our own 'Street Party'.
After our 'Street Party' we went to join the rest of the school for community traditional games on the field. It was such a wonderful day and it felt very special coming together as a school community.
Our wonderful sunshine weeks are continuing and this week we have loved continuing our Hungry Caterpillar story and embraced VE celebrations too!
We have had some great writing adventures about our caterpillars, worked on our higher numbers and enjoyed playing 'Bingo' with our 'teen' numbers too. We have been learning about how to plant seeds using the story 'Jasper's Beanstalk' as our inspiration ready to do some planting next week and worm hunting. We have made some lovely symmetrical butterflies and then of course had so much fun learning about VE day and celebrating it at as a whole school community. A special historic memory to make - well done. Alnwick Castle Class.
Week beginning Monday 28th April
What a glorious week back for the start of the Summer term and our new topic 'The Great Outdoors'.
We began the week with our 'core' story of the moment 'The Hungry Caterpillar'. There are so many things to discuss but we also choose some words to act out such as 'ravenous', 'cocooned' and 'flamboyant so perhaps you might like to use these at home too when the opportunity arises. We have used this story as the theme for our 'Drawing Club' writing (our writing part of our English lessons) and done a wonderful job writing about the character the caterpillar and the setting of the garden. Now that we have covered all Set 1 and 2 sounds we are recapping them each day and have begun reading the RWInc Green Books daily in class. We loved having our reading buddies from Year 5 back too.
In maths we have been working on our 10-20 'teen' numbers, playing lots of new games with them and looking how we can make them on a tens frame with a ten and the ones so for example we can see that 13 is made up of 10 + 3. Any opportunity to practice reconising and making 10-20 numbers at home would be a great help.
We have also enjoyed getting outdoors, going on a nature spring hunt, being in the forest and celebrating World Earth Day and looking at plants in particular. We used the story 'Titch' to get us thinking about how things can grow from the smallest seed and sometime small things can be just as important as the bigger things in life. We loved learning how to construct paper into a spring and made our own spring caterpillar. We even made our caterpillars a home! At the end of the week we began thinking about special places as part of our RE and in music we loved working on our pitch and beats with Mr Moloney.
We have restarted our 'Rainbow Challenges' this term - this is where we get seven different tasks that we have to complete in our own 'play to learn' time. Since we have a short week next week we will continue these ones but already some people have reaches a gold star by completing them all!
What a busy start to our learning adventures for this half term....we can't wait to return after the Bank Holiday as we will be ready to start some planting!