May Day celebrations

Arguably one of the best days of the year for the children today as the maypole came out again and thank goodness the sun was shining! This really is one of those things that the children remember about their time at Sutton and every year we look forward to getting outside and dancing with our friends and family.

Orange Class were fantastic and very excited, as I'm sure those of you who joined us could see! I was very impressed at how well the children remembered our routine and their smiles were just fantastic as we danced. Thank you everyone for being such great spirits and joining the family dance - it was fab!

I shan't be in school now until next Tuesday due to Forest School training and the bank holiday, so in advance I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

(p.s I am hoping to add some of the children's RE work onto this post soon as it looked very fun and messy, shall be on once I've heard from Mrs Holmes so keep an eye out!)

Plants

This half term we are learning all about plants! The children have learnt lots of scientific language and are now able to explain the process of germination using the correct names for parts of plants. Those of you who were in assembly I'm sure would agree that they have done a fantastic job!

The book we have been learning from is called 'from seed to sunflower' and it has helped us learn all about explanation texts.

We decided that now we are experts it would be a great idea to try and grow our own sunflowers, so these are now on the windowsill in class and we are keeping a close eye on them!

Thankfully, we have had some help from Emma's grandad who has given us this one and some top tips - thank you!

We have also begun another ongoing science project this week to do with plants. Last week, the children came up with their own plant questions. This week we decided we would put these to the test. Together, we decided to test these questions:

The children learned all about keeping our test fair and only changing the thing you were testing - in this case the amount of light, and in our other experiment the amount of water. We learnt that to be fair, everything else should be kept the same.

We have our own project books where we have decided which of the two experiments we would like to follow. We have made predictions about what we think will happen and talked about how we are answering our question. Over time, as the seeds begin to change we will record our observations.

Have you grown anything at home? 

Have a wonderful weekend!

Sunshine!

This week we have been very lucky with the weather and have taken the opportunity to make use of our wonderful KS1 outdoor area.

On Monday, we did some observational drawing and used nature as our inspiration. The children chose 2 natural objects and spent time observing them closely with magnifying glasses before sketching them in detail with a sketching pencil. We couldn't believe how much there really was to notice on a stick! Come and see our finished drawings on the washing line in class.

On Wednesday, we had an absolutely fantastic turnout for our weekly drop & read session (Wednesdays at 2.40pm - all welcome!) and it was so wonderful to see so many adults in our school enjoying time reading with the children in the sunshine.

On Fridays, we do an extended phonics session in preparation for the Y1 phonics screening and this week we made the most of the sunshine. The children moved around several activities, practising recognising and reading the sounds they have learnt in class. Here are the children in full swing!

Sorting split digraph sounds (a-e, o-e, i-e, e-e, u-e for example in made)

Spotting sounds (wh, ir and ue) in real and nonsense words

 Adult-led spelling

Finally,  during golden time on Friday, several little helpers were on hand to sort the outdoor area and make it look tidier for the summer, so you should see quite a difference when you are next out there! Keep an eye out for our sunflowers which we will be planting next week and have a wonderful weekend. 

Extra mention (see full blog post for the week below)

Thank you to Kirsty (Red/Green class parent) who brought in her bunny Rosie for the class to enjoy. It was a perfect little Easter treat just before our disco! We loved seeing her and finding out lots of new things about rabbits!

Dream catchers

Orange Class have helped with writing the blog this week - the words here are from the class.

Orange Class have been making beautiful dream catchers. First we designed our dream catchers. We had to think about what we would use. We made a list of things we would need. We drew our dream catchers and used lots of different colours. On the bottom of our dream catchers we put things that make us happy because a dream catcher scares away bad dreams like in the BFG.

Here we are making them...

Here are our finished dream catchers!

Fantastic weaving skills Orange Class - this activity took a lot of patience and you had to be so resilient like Tigger. Well done you! Have a fantastic weekend all!