Category: Pioneers Class

After reading, “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs”, Mrs Hann collected up some clouds with a big spoon. She brought them in for the Pioneers to feel and to and to flatten. 

The clouds went everywhere.

The addition of flour and water made the compost much stickier and the children experimented with the consistency. They were very restrained when helping themselves to their required ingredients. They helped each other and at one point I heard a little voice say,”We are a team.”

Look out for some fabulous writing done on Friday. This will be displayed in the classroom from Monday.

Cool Badger Food.

So many beautiful moments in learning.

The dry sandwich filling didn’t work so. we tried adding water. This was great fun but the filling was still a bit flaky. We really needed to add something else to hold it all together.

Following on from our trip to the forest,the badger came and ate all the sandwiches we had made. He left us a message asking us to make some more and write him a list of all the things we used. This caused a lot of excitement and a huge desire to write. Some spent the whole morning writing for the badger,filling two pages of ingredients. Some constructed their own sentences asking for help when needed.

The excitement continued outside where more sandwiches were made using dough and stuff.

Lucky Badger and his naughty brother had lots of food.

All of the work done is up on the walls in the classroom. 

More Badger snacks will be created soon to extend our exxploration of sandwich fillings. It could get messy!

We celebrated Chinese New Year by learning a bit about the traditions around the event. The key focus is on family. The celebrations bring together family who often live far apart for the rest of the year. We discussed stories,language and food. We used “Noodle Sticks” and had a sniff of some powerful spices. 

Everyone went home with a fortune cookie. Some went home with some Five Spice Powder on their clothes and some had a good covering of black paint!

A lovely afternoon.

After reading The Disgusting Sandwich we went to our beautiful forest to recreate the tasty treat for badgers and foxes. The sun shone and it was so lovely. The Pioneers collected grit,grass,sand,bark and the odd log to fill their sandwiches. Some children realised that dry ingredients didn’t make for great sandwiches when all the filling fell out or blew away. This led to some unintended extra learning about texture and consistency!

We took the opportunity to sit quiet;y and listen to the birds. In a very short time the birds came back to the trees and the tweeting increased. We filled up the bird feeders and trudged back to school.

Back in the classroom we will be able to write lists of ingredients for our own sandwiches.

Pop in to see the progress.

Very happy learning.

This week has been full of counting. The Pioneers are very excited to be using symbols to represent their thinking. Their focus and excitement to know what comes next is just fabulous. 

Numicon is the most fantastic resource and coupled with the fun of Numberblocks we are seeing real progress.

Go Pioneers.

One of the Pioneers said that he would like to be a vet when he grows up so we turned our role play into a vet’s consulting room and reception. During the week we have looked at what pets need,what might be going on on the inside and doing some wonderful writing,drawing and reading.

The cats and dogs all have name tags on now and have been well fed and have a cosy bed to lie on.

Look in reading records for a photograph of our sentences to read together.

Happy Learning

The new year has started with new maths. Many of us are ready to use numbers to represent our thinking.The Pioneers are so organised that we can all sit on the carpet and work together with Numicon. This is really amazing.Everyone has returned with an excitement about number so we have worked hard this week. We have had fun with the number wheel,talked lots about zero and written down our calculations using plus and equals.

So much going on. So many questions.

Happy Maths.

The Pioneers have really got the hang of choosing a new book. When we visit the library they go straight to the shelves and delve in. Some go straight to fiction picture books,choosing authors and illustrators that they recognise. Others go to the big non-fiction encyclopedia type books and pour over the pictures. Others have found the books that they can actually read themselves and this is a great joy. They then assume a reading position and chat and browse. The whole class was really intent on reading when we visited this week. It was wonderful to stand back and watch the interactions.

Take a look in bags to see which book your little reader selected.

Happy Reading