Christmas Celebrations Part 1- Performance and Dinner

We’ve been practising our Christmas Performance for weeks!

We started practising in the Studio and learning the songs in classrooms then we got to go to the Hall and see where we would do it for real with our families watching.

We got better and better learning to remember our words until the grown ups didn’t need to remind us at all. We remembered our words and acting all by ourselves. We didn’t even need the grown ups to remind us when it was our turn to move.

We did a dress rehearsal when the Y1 and Y3 children to see us and help us practise at saying our words in front of an audience. We also got to try on our costumes for the first time.

Then it was the big day and it was time to show our families our Christmas Show- Whoops a Daisy Angel.

When we went in the big hall it was packed. We ran out of chairs and some of our friends and families had to stand up! It didn’t put us off though…. we were amazing! All the grown ups in school were so so proud of us for putting on our show and remembering all of our words.

Rightly so, our families and friends gave us a MASSIVE clap at the end to say well done and show how proud they were of us. Some of them said we were amazed that we were so confident to stand up in front of all of those people and speak.

Our fun day wasn’t over there though….. Wednesday was also Christmas Dinner day! We were all very excited to try our Christmas dinner and even the teachers had one as well.

You might spot some other school adults in the picture as well. We thought our school Christmas Dinner was yummy.

Our Christmas celebrations are well underway and we can’t wait for some more Christmassy excitement 🙂 We’ll be letting you know what we’ve been up to soon…..

Big thanks to all the parents carers who supported our Performance by not only attending on the day but also providing items for costumes when we asked.

Thank You! 

 

A Huge Thank You to our Mums

We had a busy week getting ready for Mother’s Day and saying Thank You to our Mums and other female carers. Wed decided that we would like to make them a card and give them a present. Everyone agreed that our mums usually liked flowers so this is what we gave them. The twist was thought that we have help our mums looks after their plant and  wait for them to grow.

We invited our mums into school. If our mums couldn’t make it then nannans could come or aunties or big sisters. The only rule was you had to be a girl! (Dads- don’t worry, you’ll get your turn when its Father’s Day and we say no Mums)

We learnt some songs to sing to our mums and then gave them their special gifts. Nursery and Key Stage One did the same. There were so many people there- over 100 mums and other female carers came! Wow!

We were so pleased to see our mums in school and share this special time with them. Thanks to everyone who came! We hope you enjoyed it 🙂

Our Christmas Nativity 2017

We did our Christmas Nativity for our grown ups today and we did such an amazing job. Everybody remembered their lines and their acting. We all did a fabulous job of singing all the songs. Well done everyone!

You can see all the special roles here. Do you recognise anyone? 

And here we are in some action shots….

A huge well done to everyone! You were all superstars! 🙂 Your parents and carers thought so too. Look at some of the amazing comments they left.

 

Our Christmas Workshop

We had a wonderful time on Friday morning when our parents and carers came in for Christmas Workshop. It was great to see so many of you there joining in with the children as they made their Christmas crafts. Some of the children from Garnet class came to say hi as well and we got to go and have a look around Garnet class.

Can you remember the different activities you got to try? 

• Christmas Pudding biscuits
• Decorate a bauble
• Making Reindeer Food
• Making paper chains
• Colouring a Christmas Picture
• Making a Christmas Tree ornament

We’d love to see some photos of your decorations around your house. Please send them to us on the class email address.

We’d also love to see if you’ve made anything else at home. Look at this great creation which was made at home and brought into school. The children even went to show Mr Siezckarek.

A huge thank you to everyone who came and made the event such as success 🙂

Onyx Class Dancers

We’ve had a few children talking about the dancing they do out of school recently. They’ve been really brave and have been doing demonstrations for the rest of the class.

We decided to watch a video of some people dancing. Miss Parker showed us some Ballet danced by professional ballet dancers. We were memorised and watched it without a sound or any movement. Some of us said we didn’t think grown ups could get their legs that high and some of us were surprised to see boys as well as girls dancing. We watched another clip later in the day and compared to two.

We asked Miss Oades to help us the next time she was in class as she used to do lots of dance when she was younger. We made our PE session a dance session and used lots of different types of music to see how we danced differently to different music.

Can you guess what sort of music we were listening to from looking at our moves? 

We found it really interesting finding out about different types of dance. Well done to the girls who shared their home experiences of dance which led to everyone finding out more about different types of dance.

Celebrating Mother’s Day

On Monday we invited all our Mums and carers to school to say thank you for looking after us. We all met in the Main Hall with the rest of Foundation Stage and Key Stage One.

We sang some songs to our Mums and carers to say how special we thought they were and how much we loved them. In Foundation Stage we sang a song called Skidamarink. Can you remember the words? We sang a song with everyone else as well called My Mum’s One in a Million. 

When we’d finished singing it was time for us to give our gifts to our Mums and carers. When we talked about Mother’s Day in class lots of the children said that their mummies liked flowers so we decided to plant them some seeds. All that they needed to do was add water and watch what happens now. What do you think will happen? 

We’d worked hard to write our Mother’s Day cards. You can see everybody’s on last week Writer of the Week post here.

A big thank you to all the Mums and carers who came to support the children at this event. The hall was packed to bursting and it was lovely to see so many of you 🙂

 

A Singing Start- A Recap

Do you remember we told you about the music sessions were having with Martin? The children loved learning new songs and having fun with music.

You can read the original post here.

The children in Nursery (FS1) also enjoyed sessions with Martin and there was the after school Shake, Rattle and Roll Music Club that we loved going to with our parents and families.

Miss Hulme has made a video all about the Singing Start sessions we’ve had in school. You can watch it by either looking at the Diamond Class blog post or going straight to the video here.

Thanks Miss Hulme. It was great watching back the fun we had and remembering when we learnt the songs. We are still singing them in class and learning some new ones.

Chinese New Year Celebrations

Last week we saw on the calendar it was Chinese New Year and decided that we wanted to find out more about it.

We saw on the picture and on the front of the Chinese New Year book in our classroom there was dragon. We went to look at the Y6 dragon on the staircase in school. It made us decide that we wanted to make our own. We watched a video of a dragon dance and thought we could do a dragon dance of our own. We talked about what we saw.

There was another discussion about Chinese Food. Lots of the children said they’ve not tried it before so we decided that is what we should do.

We also thought what else we wanted to know about Chinses New Year and wrote some questions. Some of us wrote it by ourselves, some of us wrote shared sentences with teacher help.

During the week we did lots of learning about Chinese New Year. We watched some videos to find out more. You can watch them here.  There is one about preparing for Chinese New Year, one about celebrating Chinese New Year and one with the Chinese New Year Story.

We enjoyed having our own races outside and seeing which animal came first, second and third when we ran.

When our dragon was finished we did what we said we wanted to and took it to the Hall to do some dragon dancing. Some of us made the dragon dance and some of us played the instruments for the music.

One of our favourite things we did during the week was we tried Chinese Food. Miss Parker said we had to cook it ourselves so we went to the oven and the microwave to cook it before we could eat it.

You can see more about what we thought about our food in the floor book. You can also see we found out the answers to our questions.  We also loved trying the fortune cookies.

You can see the questions we wrote and the answers we found out here…

We have loved learning about Chinese New Year!

What have we been learning? 

• about how different people celebrate. 
• some of the ways that Chinese people celebrate Chinese New Year. 
• to think of questions about what we could find out. 
• to find out the answers to our questions. 
• to order numbers and use ordinal numbers such as first, second and third. 
• to taste new foods and talk about how it tasted. 
• to move to music and create our own.

How can you continue the learning at home? 

• Watch the videos again and see if you can find out anything new. 
• Have some races in the park and see who the winner is. 
• Think of some other things that you’d like to find out and look in books to find the answer. 

Fabulous Fireworks

When it was Bonfire Night we had lots of fun learning about fireworks. There were lots of activities to do in our classroom to really get us thinking about what the fireworks looked like and sounded like. We even had a go at moving our bodies like the fireworks.

 

Once we’d done all the different activities we turned our ideas into poems on the computer. Miss Parker found a programme which meant the words moved and made sounds! We had to sound out to spell the words and think carefully which letters made those sounds.

Look at some of our finished poems… Can you read them back looking at the sounds and letters?  

Pictures of the poems are coming soon!

You can look in our floor book to see some more of our learning.

What have we been learning? 

• To think about Bonfire Night using all of our senses. 
• To think about how we can move like fireworks. 
• To make pictures and models of fireworks looking carefully what we want them to look like. 
• To sound out to spell new words and find the letters to make the sounds. 

How can you continue the learning at home? 

• Talk about different sounds and what makes the sounds. You can look on the Phonics Play website on the Phase 1  Sound Starters. Look in your homework book for the password. 
• Try and sound out to spell some other simple words. Do you know what the letters look like for each sound? 
• Think about the different times of year we have fireworks. Which celebrations often have fireworks? 

 

Shake Rattle and Roll with the Music Man

We’ve been very lucky over the last couple of weeks because Martin the Music Man has been to visit us.

He brings his guitar and other instruments to play with us and we sing lots of songs. Can you remember any of the songs we have been learning? Maybe you can sing them at home as well. 

Martin will be coming for 10 weeks in total so we’ve got lots more to learn. We’re going to be doing some different music activities as well as the singing.

Don’t forget there is also the Shake Rattle and Roll Music club after school on Mondays with Martin. It is open to any child in Foundation Stage and their brothers and sisters (it doesn’t matter if they are older or younger), the only condition is that parents have to stay with the children. It is held in Nursery 3-3.45pm every Monday. Just let us know if you’d like to join in as well.