Summer 2026
Summer Week 4 - The Great Outdoors inspired inspired by David Attenborough
We have loved continuing our David Attenborough learning this week wonderfully linking our topic of ‘The Great Outdoors’ and our Beach School last week. Our whole school assemblies have been supporting all our leaning about David Attenborough, nature and how to help preserve it too. In English, we loved making stories for 'Oi Frog' by inventing new chairs and thinking about where they might go for adventures. This gave us the opportunity to link in our Science learning about living things, how things grow and the life cycles of caterpillars, frogs and plants. We were very excited to see that our own real caterpillars have developed their chrysalis and we cannot wait to see what happens next! We enjoyed working on our shapes and patterns again as well as recapping our numbers each day. In our Forest School we worked on 'leap frogging' our numbers to 20 as well as being nature detectives. Last week on Beach School we used 'The Snail and the Whale' to help inspire our David Attenborough adventures and we made clay snails on the beach. So this week we decided to paint them in celebration. We then recapped some favourite artist that we have looked at over the year and reading the book 'The Snail Trail' we looked at Henry Matisse. This inspired us to make our own snail shape artwork. Another wonderful week of adventures linking our learning across the curriculum for 'The Great Outdoors'.
Summer Week 3 - The Wonder of nature...
The Bank Holiday made it a short yet still a busy week! It was so fun to come back and see how our caterpillar friends had grown and we linked in lots of learning about other life cycles too. It was lovely to have Wildlife Rangers Tara and Katherine from the Space for Shorebirds project. This was a wonderful way to teach the children about the local birds they see on Beach School and have been studying as part of their creative work for the Alnmouth Arts Festival, developing their local wildlife knowledge. It was fascinating to see, hear and learn how we can help protect our local wildlife. As well as lots of nature books, we have begun our next core story book 'Oi Frog' and have been having lots of rhyming fun. In maths, we have continued our 10-20 work, tried some subtraction number sentences and been relooking at shapes. We have loved practising our folding, drawing and cutting techniques to make symmetrical butterflies. In Science, we are learning about enjoyed finding plants in our outdoor area and then making predictions about our growing sunflower. Lots of growing and creature fun! We had a great day at Beach school today. We celebrated David Attenborough’s 100th birthday and went exploring, climbed a mountain and then made clay snails after reading ‘The snail and the whale’ by Julia Donaldson. We made new lands for the snail to visit with jungles, volcanoes and caves. After lunch we read the Lighthouse Keepers lunch then made lighthouses with a zip line! What a great day and wonderful way to celebrate a special historic birthday at the end of the week!
Summer Week 2 - The Caterpillars!
Lots of excitement this week as to continue our great outdoors adventure we had the arrival of our caterpillars! We can't wait to watch them grow and develop and fingers crossed develop into some wonderful butterflies...watch this space! As well as working on our phonics and reading, we have written some great adventures about 'The Hungry Caterpillar'. Then in maths as well as trying to perfect our numbers 10-20 we have developed our adding and subtracting skills. We had adventures inspired by our caterpillars - trying some fruit kababs, just like the hungry caterpillar. We even found wild caterpillars in an outdoor area and made our own 3D caterpillars using lots of 3D modelling skills to form them. In Science, we enjoyed finding plants in our outdoor area and then making predictions about our growing sunflower. Lots of growing and creature fun!
Summer Week 1 - The Great Outdoors
What a fun and busy week to start our summer term... We began in the sunshine, straight into our new topic 'The Great Outdoors' and our new core book 'The Hungry Caterpillar'. We knew lots about the story already so it was great to practise our joining in and story retelling, up-leveling our language and thinking with our 'VIPERS' questioning and 'Super Seven' vocabulary. In math we are working on our 'teen' numbers and looking how we can make them compose with 'tens' and 'ones'. It was also an exciting start to our term as we began our environmentally friendly 3D bird arts project which is going to join with the rest of the school in the Alnmouth Arts festival. We had some great discussion about local birds and then discovered we were going to create our very own puffin. We learnt how to identify them and some facts about them and were particularly interest that they create burrows to nest their eggs in! We then used recycled material, recapped our 3D shapes and then learnt which features we needed to create and how we could use our skills to make them. We loved that each puffin was unique and had their own invidual look. The rest of the week we enjoyed our new rainbow challenges, getting back to forest school, using our science knowledge of nature to help our topic as well as our PE, RE and PSHE thinking for the new term. What a great start to a new and excting half term, Alnwick Castle Class!