We had such a wonderful first session at Forest School! Many thanks to Mrs Ashley for all her hard work planning and setting up our brilliant lessons for us! At Forest School, we learn outside in our woodland areas and the activities help us to develop many life skills. We love being outside, exploring nature and learning about the environment. Forest School is so much fun!

We started by exploring our Forest School areas and learning the rules and routines. The children who had been to Forest School before could recall many of the rules. Well done Emeralds!

Our Forest School learning links to our new unit of learning on plants. We created our very own journals to document the learning we complete at Forest School. Emerald Class worked really hard to create their own journals, it was quite tricky to create but the children were so resilient and had a good try at using the sticks and rubber bands to tie their books together. Great job Emeralds!

We hunted around for signs of Spring. I was so impressed that the children could recall so many facts about Spring from our previous topic about the seasons. We saw many signs of Spring; lots of buds on the trees and new life starting to grow. We recorded our findings in our new journals.

We had a great time exploring in Forest School! You can see from the children’s faces how much they have enjoyed today! Well done brilliant Emeralds!

“I love reading because I have a big smile on my face” Maddie said! Emerald Class love to hear stories, share books and read!

We have had a wonderful, busy and fun day celebrating World Book Day! What fun we had dressing up as our favourite book characters or wearing comfortable pyjamas!

A few weeks ago, Thomas said “it’s amazing what you learn from a book” and we absolutely love this phrase! It has become a class motto! Today, Emerald Class reflected on the importance of reading and I was amazed with the discussion we had in Year One. Here are some of the things said about reading!

We talked about why learning to read is so important:

“Reading is important to help with our writing!” Maisie

William added “reading can help us in maths too!”

“We want to get better at reading” Olivia

We also explored why we enjoy reading:

“I like reading because I like to learn facts and how to learn about the world. We stretch ourselves” Daisy

“I like reading to get super clever” Jaxon

“I like to read because I learn lots of words” Darcie

“I feel calm when I have a story” James

“Reading is fun” Annabel

Well done Emeralds! It was such a joy to hear that you have such enjoyment for reading! 😊❤

We had lots of fun activities on World Book Day! We were visited by Cinderella and we loved sharing our love of books with her! We were even treated to a story and a beautiful singalong! We had a magical time! Thank you Cinderella for coming to visit us, we loved it!

We were also visited by Mrs Noden! Thank you for sharing two wonderful stories with us! We loved the story ‘Aliens in Underpants’, it made us laugh so much! Emerald Class also loved hearing the story and joining in with the classic, Hairy Maclary!

We also had lots of fun reading and sharing the books we brought in from home as well as some of our favourites from our class library. We also used the laptops to complete some fun phonics games where we had to work really hard to apply the sounds we are learning. Well done Emeralds! Emerald Class also completed a fun book scavenger hunt to spot lots of different characters and settings. Well done for finding them Emerald Class! We also completed word searches, made wanted posters for characters such as Goldilocks and we also loved to stop, drop and roll for reading times throughout the morning! I think it’s fair to say we have had a great day celebrating World Book Day and sharing all the things we love and adore about reading! Great work Emeralds!

Emerald Class had a jam-packed day of busy learning and fun for team day! Our theme was Valentine’s Day and Kindness! We started today with computing where the children designed and created their own kindness bears. We thought about the qualities we would like to see in a kindness bear and Emerald Class had some great ideas for how to show kindness each day. ❤

Can you complete some random acts of kindness? 😃⭐

As part of our science activity, we took part in a STEM challenge to build a structure of hearts. The children worked in their teams (some as a whole group, others in pairs within the group and other children worked independently in their team) to create hearts out of strips of paper and card. They were challenged to build the tallest standing structure – it was a fun and tricky challenge! It was such a joy to see the children so engaged in the task!

We also learnt a friendship song and the children also took part in PE, art and RE activities. A fun and busy day!

We have also been learning about Mental Health Week too! We took part in gardening activities and enjoyed being outside. We planted some seeds and we can’t wait to see them grow!

After half term, we will be beginning our new topic ‘Enchanted gardens’ and we can’t wait to learn more about plants and being outside! We have Forest School next half term on a Friday afternoon which we are thoroughly looking forward to!