This term we are looking at all the different celebrations that happen at this time of year! 

We will be thinking about Halloween, Diwali, bonfire night, remembrance day, and then building up to Christmas and our Nativity.

We are adding these onto our class timeline as they happen, so that we can remember what we have been getting up to and how everyone celebrates differently, continuing our learning around ourselves and our community! 

 If you have celebrated in any way, please can you share these on seesaw with us? We would love for the children to share their experiences with their classmates.

We started by reading the text "Little Glow" 

We talked about the different celebrations the text explores, and shared our experiences of Halloween over the holidays! 
We then talked about how we can bring "little glows" to others by being kind, and explored how we might do this. Children thought they could give hugs, make coffee, be kind and share our toys or tell people we love them. 

We explored different celebrations, making birthday cake in Play-dough, making candles in creative area and creating towns and trick or treating in the small world! 

 

On Tuesday we conducted an experiment! We looked at different places in our classroom, then predicted where our little glow candles would shine brightest, thinking about why and trying to justify our reasons. 
 

In groups we each predicted where we thought it would shine brightest, went to find out, then came back and recorded our findings with widget picture cards to show this. 
 

On Wednesday it was the 5th November, and so we fully immersed ourselves in bonfire night! We talked about why we celebrate, finding out who Guy Fawkes was, and his treacherous plot! We talked about how to stay safe around fire and fireworks and what to do with sparklers. 

We chalked fireworks outside, designed our own fireworks and wrote the sound they made! 
We also moved around like fireworks, thinking about the different kinds and then we made sparkler sticks and had our own mini bonfire and dances with them to the song "firework"! 
 

On Thursday we shared our experiences of the previous night, reflecting on who did similar things and who did different. 

Then we thought about Remembrance Day as parades will be this weekend! We discussed wars that happened in the past a long time ago, and how we remember soldiers. We took part in lots of different poppy themed activities to think about and explore this. 
 

We then re embarked on drawing club! 
 

This week our drawing club is around the animation "Bananaman" 

Our 8 ambitious vocabulary words for the week are: 

We have LOVED Bananaman and have been so engaged with the animation! We made superhero masks, saved superhero's from Zurg, made our own secret codes and made ray guns to change people in construction!

Our next week of Drawing Club was around the text "A Dark Dark Tale" by Ruth Brown 

Our 8 ambitious vocabulary words for the week are: 

We thought the story set a very spooky scene and were all shocked when it was a mouse in the dark dark box at the end of the story! 
We have really loved getting into provision and trying new things! We especially enjoyed using our shape knowledge from last week to cut out shapes and make mice, and using wind up mice to get to cheese and read the cvc words on it! 

In topic we are thinking about celebrations that happen in December. We could all say that Christmas was coming, but when looking at "little glow" again, we noticed there was another celebration in there too! 
 

As a result, we have explored the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. We have talked about the Jewish story of Hanukkah. We explored different items related to Hanukkah, and then recreated these in a range of ways! 
We made Menorahs in the creative area, stars using our fine motor skills, synagogue in the construction area and coloured and labelled pictures! 

On Wednesday, we tried some foods that might be eaten at Hanukkah, then wrote what we found out!

What we tried were sweet, and we used great words to describe them as we thought about our senses,  such as "delicious", "gooey", and "sticky".

 

After learning about Hanukkah, we then thought about the next celebration that will happen, the Christian celebration of Christmas!
 

First we thought about what we think of when we think about Christmas. We said "Santa", "presents", "Christmas trees", "decorations and lights". 

We then wrote our letters to Santa! We thought about something we would really like to ask for and then tried using our best phonic and writing skills to do this! 
 

We then moved onto thinking about how. Christians celebrate Christmas, and they believe Jesus was born on Christmas Day. We looked at the Christmas' story and linked this to our upcoming nativity performance. We took part in lots of different activities around this, including still working on strengthening our hand muscles with fine motor skills. 
 

 

We thought about ourselves as babies and how we have grown and changed since we were born. We looked at our own baby photos, and then photos of us now, and what activities we might do at each stage. 
 

To round off our learning we went on a school trip to Sundown Adventure land! We had a fabulous time  and all of our Super Sparrows were a credit to school. We met Santa, went on lots of rides, and even saw a show! It was so much fun and such a fabulous celebration of our amazing Autumn Term.