“Bringing Learning to Life”
To begin our topic we had a Castle themes Tea Party! We dressed up as Princes, Princesses, Knights, Lords and Ladies and even dragons! We enjoyed decorating (and then eating!) crown shapes biscuits. We were all very excited to begin learning about Castles!
Our topic Traditional Tales focused on Little Red Riding Hood. We became familiar with the story, identifying features of a traditional tale as well as acting out and sequencing the main events.
To conclude our unit, we created our own story maps and re-wrote the entire story! We included skills we learnt, such as speech, adjectives, and conjunctions. We shared our stories with Honey Pot Class, who enjoyed being read to!
On completion of our division unit, we moved onto statistics and place value. We learnt about and used pictograms, block graphs and tally charts. We enjoyed many practical lessons using rulers and metre sticks to measure and compare different objects. Sentence stems supported our vocabulary.
Our half term finished looking at shapes, naming, making and sorting 2D and 3D shapes.
In this unit we have been looking at Uses of everyday materials. We have identified and grouped materials, thinking about their properties and if they are man made or natural. We spent some time looking at how we can move and change materials. We discovered which materials we could bend, stretch, squash and twist, and thought about what properties affected this.
At the end of our topic, we visited Mountfitchet Castle, a Motte and Bailey Castle. We explored the castle and visited the Norman Village hidden behind the castle walls. We were excited to see a catapult, the stocks, and the mill stone which took three children to push round! We visited the Black Smiths, where the soldiers’ helmets and shields would have been made.
We learnt lots of information, including the Bakery fire was only lit once every week or two, it would take 48 hours to bake a loaf of bread.
We thoroughly enjoyed seeing first hand some of the exciting parts of a castle we’ve learnt all about. Even the rain didn’t stop us!