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.

​This week we have been busy creating firework pictures. We used pastels and created individual firework pictures and then later in the week we worked collaboratively to make a whole class firework display. We added glitter to give the fireworks a real sparkle!

​This week our number of the week has been ‘8’ and we had great fun playing the ‘grab 8’ estimating game.  In this activity you have to put your hand in a bag of small objects and try and grab 8. You then record how many objects you actually grabbed. A few of us grabbed eight exactly!

​Finally, we created a secret writers club. Here we had fun writing in the dark using torches, lights and UV pens.

​This week we have been looking at the story ‘What the Ladybird Heard’  by Julia Donaldson. We made our own salt dough ladybirds and painted them.

​We also made our own small world farm by creating our own animals. We used pegs as legs and these helped the animals to stand. We had great fun acting using these to act out the story.

​This week Cherwell class have been very busy inside and out. We have been looking at numbers 1-10 and drawing and playing hopscotch. The children were very interested in drawing their own hopscotch boards.

​We have been exploring the story ‘Funny bones’ this week, and we have made our own scenes using the characters from the story. We then created our own speech bubble ideas.

​To finish off the week we decorated gingerbread men in the style of skeletons.