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The Investigation Bureau

This half term Beech Class became detectives at The Investigation Bureau working for Chief Inspector Anita Case.

We work on two major cases! The Case of the Stolen Nursery Rhymes and The Case of the Mixed Up Materials.

Someone hd been stealing items from Nursery Rhymes. The detectives were on the case, investigating Nursery Rhymes and their suspects – The Grand Old Duke, Old MacDonald and the Old Woman who swallowed a fly! The detectives learned lots of Nursery Rhymes and used labels, captions and lists to help with their case file.

Our second case involved helping Portal Builder, who had forgotten which materials were needed to complete their building projects. The detectives investigated all kinds of materials, naming them, exploring their properties and matching the best one to different purposes.

Chief Inspector Anita Case was please to report that the detectives solved all their cases, including catching Old MacDonald, the culprit in The Case of the Stolen Nursery Rhymes!

Station Studios – Traditional Tales

This half term Beech Class have been working for Olive Stein at Station Studios. They have had the very important job of exploring Traditional Tales and using their learning to carry out a range of exciting tasks and challenges.

They have read a range of Traditional Tales and used the classroom role play and small world areas to act out and perform using puppets and different story objects. They have also used a range of materials to explore building, sequenced stories, made porridge and had fun creating different crafts. As part of their work for Station Studios they have had to work hard adding and subtracting, reading and answering questions about stories and practising their writing skills.

Advertising Agency 1

Agency 1 worked extremely hard for Olive Stein. They were given the task of making a moving picture book but before they could do that they had to look at lots of different Traditional Tales. They looked at Little Red Riding Hood and made up their own class story called Little Royal Lizzie which was about a girl who had borrowed a crown from the Queen and when she was returning it, she was greeted by a Big Bad Wolf! They then looked at the story of the Three Little Pigs, they made some houses out of straw, lego, wood and paper and had to decide which house was the best. The lego house seemed the strongest so the advertisers had to make a video trying to sell the house to the Three Little Pigs. Finally, they read the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, they made and tasted some delicious porridge and then made a moving picture book all about Goldilocks. They done some brilliant work!

In maths, they worked on their adding and subtracting skills using numbers up to 20. They used lots of concrete resources to help them solve the problem!

Another fantastic term Beech class, Well done!

The Time Institute!

Last half term, Beech class worked extremely hard working for the Time institute.We had to stop the evil trickster from trying to erase the past so we learned all about key events and people in history.

We learned all about the Great Fire of London and wrote a recount of what had happened in London. We made bread using a recipe from 1666 and it was very delicious! We then tried to be like the firemen from 1666 trying to get the water from the river and passing it in leather buckets to put out the fire.

We had to write a letter all about Florence Nightingale and why she was important and we made a lantern like the one Florence used as she was called the ‘Lady and the Lamp’.

In maths, we have been learning about addition and subtraction as well as shape, we impressed everyone by making shapes out of themselves! We can add and subtract using numbers up to 10 confidently!

To support all of our learning we had a trip to Beamish. We saw Santa and his reindeer’s and learned all about Victorian life and how different the houses, schools and shops are compared to our life today.

Whitehouse Farm

Year 1 recently went to Whitehouse Farm on a school trip. This was to help them learn about animals. When at the farm they explored the different areas and had lots of fun! They played in the play park, went on a tractor ride, held a range of small animals, fed some larger animals and explored the different animal areas, learning all about them as they moved around the farm.

Flowerton Enterprises

We have been working for Regina Flowerton at Flowerton Enterprises. As our role as Nature Experts we have have many jobs to complete. Firstly we learned about different plants and animals. We used our learning and information to complete special pieces of work for Regina. We have taken a lot of our learning this half term outside and made the most of the summer weather whilst exploring the summer season in Science lessons. This helped us with our investigations. We have also spent time in our Garden Centre role play where we have many activities linked to plants and flowers.

Portal Travel

This half term Beech Class have been working as Travel Agents for Portal Travel. In Branch 1 we have been focussing on Africa and have designed some brilliant information posters for the Travel Agents.

In English we have learned about Jill Murphy stories and information posters and we know the differences between fiction and non fiction texts. We even used this to create our own.

In Maths we have been practising using arrays and sharing to multiply and divide numbers in the 2,5 and 10 times tables. We have also started to learn about fractions.

Our artist of the half term has been Mondrian. We have used black lines, squares, rectangles and primary colours to re create some of his famous artwork. We did this using paints and design apps on the iPads.

In PE we have been learning Cricket skills including throwing, catching and batting the ball.

During the sunny weather we have taken a lot of Science outdoors. We investigated and learned about different birds, build birds nests and hung out bird feeders made by Mystery Club.

The Investigation Bureau

This half term Beech Class have been working for The Investigation Bureau.

We spent some time exploring instructions. We used our learning to write our own instructions for fruit kebabs and then followed these instructions in order to make the healthy snack.

We have been learning about measures including weight, length, height and capacity. We learned about g, kg, ml, l, cm and m. We compared, measured in standard and non-standard units and plan to continue this work further.

Our art this half term has focused on collage. We teamed this with our DT and Science learning (healthy eating/food) to create food collages.

We have continued to explore Nursery Rhymes and stories and have looked at different ways to spell words. This has included days of the week, suffixes and prefixes.

Portal Animation Studios!

This half term we have been coming to work as Animators for Olive Stein at her new company Portal Animation Studios. Our role as Animators was to research and create animations. This involved a lot of training and exploring.

Our first animation was Little Red Riding Hood. We have been learning about Traditional Tales and writing some of our own. We used puppets, a puppet theatre and Stop Motion app in the iPad to retell this story and turn it into an animation.

Our second animation was How to make a healthy sandwich. We researched healthy eating and different food groups and found out how to write instructions. We then wrote our own set of instructions in groups and followed them in order to make a ham and lettuce sandwich. They were delicious! We then took photos of each stage of making the sandwich and turned it into an animation.

Whilst working for Portal Animation Studios we learned about many different things and gain new skills.  We studies the artist Ted Harrison and used pastels and crayons to create setting pictures which helped us with our story backgrounds. We also continued to develop our maths and English skills.

 

The Time Institute!

This half term Beech Class have been working as Time Agents for The Director at The Time Institute. The evil Vortex had erased some of the past and we had to find out what happened. Part of our job involved learning about important historic individuals including: Samuel Pepys, Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale. We explored The Victorian times; as well as Queen Victoria and The Great Fire of London.

Alongside our history learning we have been continuing to develop our maths and English skills which has involved addition and subtraction, place value, shape, familiar stories and response texts (diaries and recounts).

To support our learning in all subjects we went on a trip to Beamish. Here we met Santa and his reindeers and learned about Victorian life including schools, homes, shops and transport by exploring the different areas of Beamish.