Blackbird Class

Welcome to Blackbird Class!

We are a class of Year One and Year Two children taught by Mrs Mee and supported by Mrs Vranch and many other adults throughout the week including- Mrs Singer, Miss Clayson, Miss Thompson, IG sports teachers, Miss Carpenter and Mrs Kendrick.

Autumn Term

September 2023. 

Last week the children made up their own class rules for the new school year. Their first home learning challenge was to read them with an adult and then to sign them, to say that they agreed to keep them.

Most home challenges will be sent home in termly blocks. However sometimes additional home challenges will be given out to individuals or groups, when needed to link with specific learning.

All home learning should be stuck into the yellow home learning scrap books and when completed put into the purple box near Blackbird class door. Thank you for your support.

Autumn 

In order to settle the class into a new school year happily, we started with a two week mini topic of "All about Me" and Art week. The children have been amazingly creative, resilient and had lots of fun establishing themselves as a new class, whilst working together wonderfully. You should be very proud of them all. Lots of learning gems have already been awarded!

This term our topic is Amazing Animals! 

We have lots of exciting learning opportunities coming up so watch this space!

Spring 2024

We started this term with a "WOW' moment looking at a crime scene in the media hub....

We all helped by looking at the clues and solved the mystery of who'd been into school over the holiday using our team work power gem (amethyst).....it was The Gruffalo! Then we tidied up the mess he'd made!

We had fun retelling the Gruffalo story with puppets, masks and games.

Next we then went on a cold walk through the countryside to see if we could see signs of any local animals.We had hoped to see the ones from the Gruffalo story (mouse, snake, owl and fox ) but sadly we did not! We did however see squirrels, ducks, a robin, a crow, a blackbird and many footprints of animals and holes where we think animals live. Now we are going to find facts about UK animals and write our own reports.

This term our topic is "Superheroes" we are looking at some superheroes from nursing history and will then explore our own emergency services superheroes followed by some fun work about comic book superheroes with a fun dress up day! 

Don't forget to look at our class displays for the BIG questions we have been asking and then finding out about.

Please read our Spring class letter, topic balloon and knowledge organiser. We have been having regular retrieval "True or false" active quizzes to see what we can still remember so please read the knowledge organisers with your child and keep them out all term .You can even make up your own home quizzes!

This term, Summer term 2024

We began our Summer term with an exciting STEAM week where the children enjoyed different science, technology, engineering, art and mathematical activities.

Our topic this term is Beside the Seaside and in history we will be looking at old toys.

Please read our Summer class letter, topic balloon and knowledge organiser. We have been having regular retrieval of the knowledge on the knowledge organiser sheet to check that the learning is still embedded, using "True or false" active quizzes and our new a class quiz box (in which the children have helped make up the questions). So please read the knowledge organisers with your child and keep looking at them again and again all term. You can even make up your own home quizzes!

Making Rain Gauges

We have been looking at the weather in geography. We recorded it daily over a few weeks and decided to make rain gauges in forest school lessons to collect all of the "April showers" we have been having!

We are scientists

STEAM week     Changing materials

We watched changes in ingredients from soft to hard, when making our window biscuits.

STEAM WEEK

Fair testing for waterproof materials

We decided to measure 100ml of water each time.Some materials surprised us!

Using our new knowledge of materials we remade our superhero capes using a waterproof material.

We are Engineers!

STEAM week box challenge

The children loved working in groups, using their amethyst gem power, to change a box.They created windows, flaps, sliding and turning mechanisms using different techniques.

Open Afternoon

We retold our "talk for writing" instructions to parents, shared our DT (superhero hand puppets) and art work in a walking art gallery and did lots of multiplication and division maths activities with our grown ups using the new resources funded by FOBS. (Thank you FOBS!)

Life Education Visit

We Are Historians!

Using drama skills in our history lessons about Florence Nightingale has helped understand how Florence Nightingale might have felt.We made a "conscience alley" and Florence (Teo) had a big decision to make about whether she should stay at home like her parents wanted or go to help soldiers in the Crimea.

We are Mathematicians

We have been learning how to measure accurately.

Naming properties of shape...and having fun building with 2D and 3D shapes.

Using real money and investigating place value.

Book Week!

We loved sharing stories with different classes, dressing up and being hot seated  as a character from a book and doing book related activities.

​​​​​​​We loved hearing "Bill's New Frock" by Anne Fine and exploring all the many Julia Donaldson books.

Superhero "Wow" Day!

We designed and started to sew superhero hand puppets and either a superhero fresh fruit salad or kebab. It was rather tricky sewing evenly without the needle falling off but we persevered!

We did some drama when we had superhero adventure in the hall, using our super powers to rescue people and finished the day with a superhero feast to eat our very healthy fruit salads and kebabs.

We had a very, very busy (but fun) day!

We worked in partners to retell a traditional tale with a 'twist' (we changed the setting and characters and tried to add a surprise!).

We are Artists 

We have experimented with printing techniques.

First we painted our feet and hands in partners and made a piece of art prints which contained these prints.

We are footballers

Developing our football skills with Mr Phillips.

We used our new skills, stopping the ball and changing direction, in a football match.

COMPUTING

We Are All Animators!

We made mini animation films of Superheroes and Villains using the software Puppet Pals.

First we discussed the characters and "problem" we wanted to have in our film and then drew a story board to help us when we recorded the animations. We tried to use our voices in an interesting way and learnt how to move characters around while we recorded our films. The software we used really made our storyboards come to life!

Using sources as historians we asked lots of questions and told each other what we'd found out from looking at the pictures.

We are Scientists!

In "Health and Well Being Week" we baked cornflake cakes to look at how solids can change form to liquids and back to solids again.

We all worked together as a group to make them.

We felt very happy when we ate them too!

Countryside Walk

We explored Beckington and recorded all of the amazing animals we saw on our walk.

Please read our class newsletter.

We are artists: 

SPIRAL ART

Blackbird Class have been exploring circles and spirals during arts week. We have made them using different media and in different sizes. A Danish artist, Molly Haslund, made circles on the ground using giant compasses and encouraged people from the city to join in. We made a group circle picture and experimented with circles in our sketchbooks.

We looked these patterns in the natural world and did some observational drawing.

We also looked at the detailed Kolam patterns made every morning from rice flour outside the houses in Chennai, India. Then we designed our own.

The children were set the challenge:

What kind of marks can you make using chalk and oil pastels when creating a snail?

Do you think they blended them well? What patterns can you see?

We also talked about different emotions when looked at Pablo Picasso’s “Weeping Woman”.

We are artists!

We Are Musicians!

We repeated patterns with lots different instruments. Then we composed music to suit emotions using percussion instruments and wrote our own music score. We worked in small groups and practised using our topas learning gem power.

Forest School

Forest school "finds".

We Are Mathematicians! 

In Year 1 we have been using shapes to create different images! We have also been making repeated patterns using different 2-D and 3-D shapes .

Computing

In computing we have been programming Bee-Bots to move in sequences around various tracks!  We then had fun debugging algorithms!

Religious Education

We Are Artists

Christmas Crafts in Art 

We used press printing to create a fireplace to go on a Christmas card. We designed our own brick fireplace to print onto our paper.

D.T.

Making frames in DT for our nativity photographs to give as a present.We liked the glue gun!

Christmas

We performed the play "A Happy Clappy Nativity".

A Nativity full of happiness…and clappiness! We retold the traditional Christmas story through an engaging script and delightful clap-along songs, which helped our understanding of music. We even managed to add some percussion instruments for musical accompaniment.

It had the hall echoing with lots of happy voices and loud applause!

We hope you all enjoyed it. Didn't they all do so well? We were very proud.