Our topic for this term in Bumble Bee class is Once Upon a Time. We love jumping into the magical world of fairy tales, especially in the run up to Christmas! We started the term with a behaviour boost based on taking pride in our environment. This included our classroom (where we have new tidy up places!), the lockers, and outside. 

We started the term with the story of The Gingerbread Man. We had our very own gingerbread man in our story basket, but one day we came in to find some small footsteps that smelt like cinnamon! The gingerbread man had left us a note saying ‘run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!’. He’s been on lots of adventures, sending us photos and postcards of what he’s been up to. We hope he comes back to us soon! For our English, we explored the story by sequencing it and writing speech bubbles for the characters. Year 1 explored adjectives and verbs too, and then wrote all their own version of the story.

Our next traditional tale was ‘The Three Little Pigs’. We definitely huffed and puffed to blow the house down! Year 1 wrote wonderful sentences about all 3 pigs, and then used brilliant adjectives to write about the big bad wolf!

Finally, it was time for the nativity story, which included rehearsing our very own called ‘The Fleece Force’. We learnt 7 songs, and all had our own lines to practise at home. It was great fun getting into costumes and performing to our grown ups!  

 In science this half term we have looked at every day materials with Mrs Triggs. This included identifying materials (and distinguishing material from object), talking about and comparing the properties of materials, and testing how materials can be changed, either with force or with temperature.

In maths, year 1 had an introduction to addition and subtraction with numbers to 10. We have focussed on the part-whole model, and how the numbers are commutative to make a variety of number sentences with the same total. We have also looked at finding a part by subtracting and using number lines to add and subtract. We then had a lot of fun experimenting with 2D and 3D shapes. We learnt lots of new names for 3D shapes and enjoyed building with them and sorting them based on their properties. We have now started working on numbers to 20, including counting to 20 and understanding teen numbers at 10 and some more.

Reception have deepened their understanding of numbers up to 5. We have looked at numbers 3, 4 & 5 in detail, including recognising 3 and not 3, counting to 3, and finding parts of 3. Reception have also spent time looking at 2D shapes, creating shape pictures and spotting them in the environment around us.
Bumble Bee Class used Gingy to help them with their geography this half term, learning about the countries of the United Kingdom he had visited: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. 
We have had a lot of fun exploring the outdoors in forest school, in particular using rope and wool. We have made magic wands, weaved poppies, made stick painting, explored in the snow, painted ice with watercolours, and got very muddy! 

The run up to Christmas included many events alongside our nativity – we have come to school in Christmas jumpers, taken part in a virtual Santa dash, enjoyed breakfast with Santa and Christmas dinner, been to the church for a carol service, and had hot chocolate and carols on the playground! What a wonderful end to 2024.