We have had another super busy week in Cherwell class this week. We were lucky enough to have a go at making soup as part of our literacy work on 'Supertato' by Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet. The children thought of some superhero vegetables they would like to include then worked as a big team to peel and chop the vegetables to make a wonderful soup. We all thoroughly enjoyed sharing it together on the carpet at the end of the day too. 

Our math's focus has been learning about 2D shapes, the children have been fantastic at guessing different 2D shapes with different riddles I have given them. They have painted 2D shape pictures, made 2D shapes out of pipe cleaners and spotted 2D shapes in our environment. 
Feel free to have a listen to the song we practiced at home too, I have added the link below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTeqUejf3D0
We had a very exciting delivery in class on Tuesday. We made predictions about what we thought it could be and the children were very excited to discover that we have caterpillars in class. We are enjoying learning about the life cycle of a butterfly and it is safe to say we are all excited to watch the chrysalis appear soon. Have a look at Tapestry to see the children having a close look at our new caterpillar friends. 
I hope you all have a lovely weekend,
See you on Monday,
​Mrs Ballard. 

Hello Everyone,
We have had another very busy week in Foundation Stage. It has been fantastic to see the children really make use of the free flow activities in the classroom. We have seen lots of children in our supermarket and have a massive amount of crafting and creating going on at our 'creation station'. There has been lots of learning opportunities outside as the weather is improving too and the children have particularly enjoyed the water play and our minibeast garden. 
Our literacy work has seen us continue our work on Supertato by Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet. We started the week by making some wonderful super hero vegetables of our own. Every one of them were very special and it was great to see the children's creativity shine through. Here are a selection below. 

 Following on from creating our vegetables the children had to write all about them independently. They gave each of their super hero vegetables a name and came up with a super power. I am sure you'll all agree we have some super writers in our class who have worked really hard to learn all about writing sentences. 

Our maths work has continued to look at money and the children had to find the right coins to make different amounts to buy ice creams. They were all very good and are beginning to understand this tricky concept.
The children have worked very hard on their PE this term already and it has been great to observe them improving their throwing and catching skills.
I hope you all enjoy a long bank holiday weekend and I look forward to welcoming you all back next Tuesday.
​Mrs Ballard. 

Hello everyone,
It was wonderful to welcome all of the children back this week after a well deserved break. We have had a wonderful first week back and it has been a busy one too.
Our maths work has focused on exploring money and learning about the different coins. The children have been real bounce- back bunnies this week as they have had to keep trying and practising this new area of our maths. We have used the till to help us count out different amounts up to 20p and thought about the different coins and how much they are worth. They were excited to learn that a £2 coin was 200p! 
We also started our new book this week for our literacy which is "Supertato" by Sue Hendra. We shared this story during our remote learning time and the children enjoyed it so much we decided to make it our topic. We began sentence stacking our story together and next week the children will write their own part of the story. We also had some vegetable ordering activities out to choose and the children were great at taking on the challenge independently. 
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The children came back after Easter and were excited to see that our lovely sunflowers have really grown. We talked about what we had done over the past term to help them grow and  I have set the children the challenge to see who can grow their sunflower the tallest. I am looking forward to seeing how they all get on.
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We have had a lovely week and I am already looking forward to next week.
Have a great weekend,
Mrs Ballard. 

Wow, I can't believe we have flown through another week in Foundation. The children have been working really hard and it has been great to see so much learning happening through their play. Inspired by our sharing assembly around the story 'What we'll build' By Oliver Jeffers the children have very much enjoyed the "Creation Station" this week. We have had many wonderful and detailed models using a range of resources. I have been impressed with the amount of cutting, sticking, planning and improving of models that there has been and I have shared a few creations below. Can you guess what they have made?
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Our literacy has continued to focus on 'Oliver's Vegetables' By Vivian French. The children have all written lists of vegetables they would buy if they were in the supermarket. They worked on these independently and I am sure you'll agree their spelling of some tricky vegetables is very impressive. See how many vegetables you can spot. 

I was lucky enough to join the children for their second session of forest school this week and I have to say it was one of the highlights of my week. It was such a pleasure to stand back and let the children explore a new environment with their friends. The amount of learning through doing going on was very impressive. Here are some of my favourite snaps from the session. 

I hope you all have a great week,
Mrs Ballard. 

We have had another fabulous week  in Foundation Stage this week. We have been practicing lots of new skills and working on building our relationships with our friends and our teachers. 
We began thinking about a new story 'Oliver's Vegetable's' by Vivian French. The children used different materials to make some of their own art work and we explored the different ways that Oliver moved in the story.
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We have also been thinking about subtraction in math's as well as recognising our numbers to 20. We used number fans so the children could all show me their answers for our subtraction questions. 

The children have enjoyed practising new skills in PE and have really loved exploring our forest school which I have loved exploring with them this week.
Hope everyone has a lovely few days,
See you next week, 
Mrs Ballard.

This week we have been learning about the nativity and completing lots of activities around the first Christmas. We have been very busy preparing and performing our nativity ready to stream to our Google Classroom. We have been practicing for a long time and we hope you enjoy watching it.
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On Friday we set up the classroom to look like a theatre and watched a pantomime together it was called ‘Cinderella’ and it was very funny. We all joined in the refrains and laughed at all the jokes! In the interval we had some popcorn and a drink. It was a lovely way to end the week.

​This week our focus has been around the storybook ‘Stick Man’ by Julia Donaldson. We read the story and then had a go at making our own transient art pieces. We worked collaboratively and it was great fun sharing ideas.
Once we had finished we pretended that we were visiting an art gallery and discussed what we liked about each piece.
Here is some of our work:

​Continuing our Stick Man theme, we had a go at making our own magic ‘stick’ wands by wrapping wool around sticks. This was great for strengthening our fingers. Mr Gidlow was turned into a frog more than once!

This week we have continued our Gruffalo story focus. We made our own Gruffalo lair using junk modelling and then added leaves, sticks and twigs to make it look really ‘hidden’. We had fun using this all week. First we used puppets to act out the story, then we made our own and finally we used our ‘mini me’ and added ourselves to the story.

​Later in the week we had a go at writing what we thought the animals in the story would be thinking. We were so proud of our work we made this display.

This week we enjoyed using ‘deconstructed role-play’. We used some boxes, packaging, tubes and anything else the children could find in and around the classroom to use and make their own role play.
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Jem and Hayden took the lead and started to make a large boat. This quickly sparked the imagination of other children. The boat had a bed, toilet, corridor and 'sand skating' area (sand sprinkled on to the cardboard)
Jaxon used the cardboard roll as a telescope "to look for treasure." 
Elliot made a phone "I'm calling Hayden."
Pippa played a number game with Jem in the sand skating arena.
Mia and Isla found a spare box and asked "where would you like this?" They then worked together in placing the cardboard in the desired space.

​We have also been retelling The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson. We created some of our own terrible creatures and wrote our own descriptions, they are very scary! Look out for more Gruffalo inspired work next week.

We have had a very busy week learning all about the Hindu festival Diwali, the festival of lights. We learnt that Rangoli patterns are colourful designs created to feel strength, generosity and to bring good luck. We had a go at making our own using pasta, rice and loose parts.

​On Wednesday morning we visited the church and had a look at all the different Poppy displays the school have made. We were very proud that our poppy wreath was hanging over the door. When we returned to school we took part in the whole school 2 minutes’ silence.

Finally this week we have been looking at road safety. We drew a chalk road around the playground and then discussed how we can keep ourselves safe when crossing and walking next to a road.

We learnt that we should always hold an adult’s hand when walking on the path and the adult must always walk closest to the road. We must also never run on a path next to a road.
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We then thought about safe places to cross. Jem knew that we could use a zebra crossing. We must always look both ways, use our good listening ears and hold an adult’s hand at all times.