York Castle Museum Adventure
This week, Year 1 and 2 visited York Castle Museum to learn more about their topic: Time Travel – houses.
The children visited and heard diary entries from people who lived in the types of rooms they were viewing. They enjoyed trying to guess which type of house they were looking at.
Leah – “First, we saw some poor and rich Victorian houses that were fancy…After that, we looked at some old and new kitchens.”
The children also explored a Victorian street and spoke to some actors from the Victorian era – their favourite spots in the Victorian street were the police station and school.
Brooklyn – “I saw an old sweet shop. It didn’t have any Smarties.”
The children had a brilliant day with excellent behaviour by all – a member of the public commented to us to say how well she thought the children were acting, behaving and listening. Well done, Year 1 and 2!
Living and Learning: I can show perseverance.
Living and Learning: I can take part in democratic decisions
This week, our living and learning focus is I can take part in democratic decisions. Democracy is a British value. We use democratic decisions a lot in our class and the children understand that this makes whole class decisions fairer.
This week, the class were introduced to a new friend: a bear. The bear needed a name and Leah suggested that it would be a good idea to have a class vote to decide his name.
The children suggested five names between them: Bob, Skye, Oli, Builder and Rosie. The children closed their eyes and put up their hand to show their choice of name.
Bob was the most popular choice with seven votes so we named the bear ‘Bob’. Bob will be joining us for some of our living and learning lessons.
Living and Learning: I understand rights come with responsibilities
This week in our Living and Learning session, we discussed how, as children, we have rights. For example, some of the rights we have are:
- the right to an education
- the right to medical care
- the right to have the freedom of thoughts
- the right to be loved and respected
- the right to be heard
- the right to relax and have fun
Whilst the children understood that these were the rights (amongst other rights) that they had, they also thought about how these rights come with responsibilities.
Here are some of our ideas.
Time Travel – house in the past and now
Our current topic is Time Travel. We have looked at what is old and new (in relation to toys) and placed toys in chronological order. We’ve now moved on to looking at homes and how these have changed over the years. Last week, we took a trip around Wetherby looking at all the different houses around. Here are the pictures of our visit around Wetherby spotting old and new houses.
This week, we’ve looked at spotting which houses are Celtic, Tudor, Victorian and more modern. We have looked at the difference and talked about which we would like to live in and why. Here, we’re trying to sort the houses into groups.
Living and Learning: I use the 8 Rs to help me learn
In today’s living and learning session, we recapped the 8 Rs of learning. Here is what we could remember about our 8 Rs.
We talked about being ready to learn by showing that we are listening and we have eyes on the speaker so we can follow the instructions given.
We respond to feedback. We have stars and cool class tokens to show when we have made a good choice. This shows learning behaviour that we should try to do again. Warnings show that we have made bad choices and we should not make the same choices again. Next steps give us feedback on our learning and how we can improve.
Resillience – If we struggle with something we can “try, try and try again” just like our Christian Value perseverance.
Being responsible for our learning. It is our own responsibility to make sure we are getting on with our learning and to make sure we are not distracted by others. We need to make sure we have our PE kit and reading book in school.
We reflect on our learning. We thought about what we have done well and what we could improve on.
We remember what we have learnt and using this to help in other contexts.
Taking a safe risk involves putting our hand up and trying to answer a question when we think we know the answer.
Being resourceful is knowing what to use to help us or who to ask.
Travelling through time…
On Friday, Hobgoblin Theatre company came into school and took the children on a trip through time – from the stone ages up until modern day. Along the journey, the children learnt many fun facts about history including how Thomas Farriner starter the Great Fire of London and wiped out the plague as he did, how Henry VII had 8 wives and how the Vikings invaded Great Britain. After the production, the children participated in a workshop – learning to become actors and how to create freeze frames.
Here are some pictures and quotes from the children about their experience.
“After the show, I liked it when we moulded people into different shapes.”
“I liked making statues.”
“I liked the funny costumes.”
“I like it when the actors told Jack to go and make them cups of tea.”
Living and Learning: reflecting on my learning and remembering what I’ve learnt.
In Living and Learning circle time, we talked about remembering our learning. We then talked about the importance of reflecting on our learning. We passed the ball around the circle and said something that is going well in our learning and reflected on something we would like to improve.
Here are some of the things we remember about our learning:
- Facts from around the world.
- Counting in 5s.
- How to write the right way around.
- Using capital letters and full stops.
- Writing and phonics.
- Counting in 2s, 3s, 5s and 10s.
- Ordering numbers.
- Time Travel topic – learning that chronological order is oldest to newest.
- Using contractions.
Here are some of our ideas for how we would like to improve our learning.
- Improve the size of my writing.
- Writing on the line and using finger spaces.
- Writing in full sentences.
- Practising counting in 3s.
- Joining my handwriting.
Year 1 and 2 Super Stars!
In Year 1 and 2, we have a marble jar that we try to fill as a class. We can earn marbles for lining up quietly, following instructions and working together as a team.
We were very excited to have filled our marble jar today so we voted on our treat – democracy in action! The children chose to have extra playtime where they were allowed to have the equipment out, play football and play on the slide.
Here are some pictures of us enjoying our treat.
Living and Learning: I am resourceful and I am resilient.
In our Living and Learning session, we talked about being resourceful and resilient.
Willow told us it would be resourceful to use a dictionary or to search for the word on the internet if you were reading and didn’t know what a word meant. Mikey said that if you needed a glue stick and didn’t have one you could use sticky tape or double-sided tape. Ellie pointed out that if you didn’t have any pink paint you could mix red and white. Leah said that if you are reading and you can’t read a word you can use your phonics to help you.
We then thought about resilience. We talked about how you might feel if you were learning something new. Emilija said you might be anxious because you might not know what to do. Daisy said that if you can’t do something straight away, you need to think about it. Mikey told us that he struggled to learn to count to 100 but he kept practising and felt happy when he could do it. We listened to the saying:
“Try to keep going, try to keep smiling, even when things get bad.
Try to keep going, try to keep smiling, then you won’t feel so sad.”