Owlets
Owlets Class have been busy making new friends and settling into school this term.
We have enjoyed learning about space along with Key Stage One, exploring what it might be like to be in space and thinking about what we would pack in our bags if we went on a space mission. We even tasted astronaut freeze-dried ice cream!
In December we had a Stay and Play session with our Mummies and Daddies. They stayed with us one morning to do some Christmas craft activities and see what it’s like to be in Owlets Class!
Some of our favourite activities this term have included:
- Cutting open a pumpkin for Halloween
- Catching snow on our tongues when it snowed!
- Having a visitor come to talk to us about Road Safety
- Going on a science school trip the Norwich Millennium Library
- Singing in front of our families in the Harvest Festival assembly
- A karate lesson
- Taking part in the Christmas play
We have had a very exciting half term in Owlets. We had some duck eggs delivered to us in an incubator and watched as they hatched one-by-one into little ducklings. We had to wait very patiently for them to crack open and then looked after them, making sure they had enough food and water to grow big and strong. When they were a few days old we got the ducklings out of their cage and held them carefully in our hands. Later on we even got them out in the hall and filled a tub up with water for them to have a paddle. It was so funny and they made us giggle lots!
Another exciting thing that happened this term was our first ever school trip! We went to Easton College to visit their farm and had a chance to hold/stroke the baby animals. We saw some lambs that were only a few days old! They were so cute and fluffy! Lots of us laughed when we saw the baby piglets because they were so noisy and kept jumping over each other as they were playing!
Our topic for the half term was Traditional Tales, specifically focussing on Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Our role play corner had a Goldilocks costume and wig and bear ears, and there was lots of porridge being made in our classroom in small, medium and big sized bowls! We even read another version of the story where Baby Bear is grown up and is lost from the woods – he ends up in New York!
Now that we have made some new friends and know what big school is all about, we have started learning some new really clever stuff!
We have been working on numbers to 10 and then to 20, making sure that we write them properly and don’t get them back to front or the wrong way around! We’ve been doing the same with our letters in phonics, and have started our own big school phonics books! We use our sound goggles to help us find the new sounds around the classroom, sing songs and play games.
Children in Need Day was lots of fun too. We came to school in our own clothes and with our teddy bear, and thought about how we can help the children who need a little bit of extra support. Pudsey bear played a big role in this!
Our class also had an important role in the school play. We acted out the nativity scene and were really brave getting up on the stage in front of all the Mummies and Daddies. It was so much fun! We got to dress up and wear costumes and come to school in the night-time!
Some other fun stuff we have been doing includes exploring the frost and the autumn leaves, learning about space, making a space ship, doing footprints with paint, cooking in the outside sand kitchen, exploring our new sensory tent with special starry lights and decorating our classroom for Christmas!
This half term the Owlets have had a busy time settling into school, making new friends, learning new routines and learning lots and lots of new things!
We have been thinking about where we live and our families, and how we all have houses and families that are all a little bit different, but sometimes a little bit similar too. We moved on to read The Three Little Pigs story, and spent ages building our own straw, stick and brick houses! We got so mucky and covered in glue and paint but we had so much fun! We even tried to make houses using different materials and thought about which ones would be strong enough to keep us safe from The Big Bad Wolf. The fabric one didn’t really work because it was too floppy and wouldn’t stand up, but we worked as a team to do the best we could! Our masks that we made of the pigs and the wolf helped us to retell the story with the houses that we had made.
Here are some photos of all of the busy things we have been doing…
In the jungle, the Owlets jungle…
This half term we have loved learning all about the jungle! We worked together to turn our classroom into a jungle with leaves, branches, and ropes and monkeys all hanging from the ceiling! We even had a secret jungle explorers’ hideout in our reading area with jungle puppets inside so that we could make up our own jungle explorer stories! In our role-play area we dressed up as animals and explorers and even went animal spotting with our jungle explorer checklist clipboards and binoculars! We made jungle animals for our big display and wrote jungle animal diary entries – we quite liked the idea of being a leopard, sleeping and eating all day long!
Our topic this half term has been Antarctica and penguins. We have been thinking about how freezing cold and icy it is in Antarctica and been up to so much! Here’s just a few of our favourites…
- Making paper maché penguins
- Feeling how cold the water must be in Antarctica!
- Looking at maps and making our own
- Writing about penguins
We haven’t forgotten about our maths and literacy though. Here’s a few of the things we’ve been doing to help us learn even more!
- Weighing things to see if they were heavy or light
- Painting numbers
- Threading numbers
- And even drawing and writing on the Interactive Whiteboard!
We have had such fun 🙂
Owlets have had a very, very busy start to school this half term and have had so much fun! We have been getting to know each other, getting to know our new school and thinking about the different places where we live.
Here are some of the things we have been getting up to…
- We painted our feet and hands! We compared the sizes of our feet and hands – it tickled lots when we had the cold, gooey paint put on!
- We listened to different sounds because we have been practising using our listening ears. We went on a sound hunt around our new school to see what we could hear and then used different instruments to make quiet and loud sounds!
- We went on a bug hunt! After we’d thought about where we live, we wondered where the little creatures in our school field lived so we went to find out! Some of us got quite muddy and mucky hands!
- We read the story of the 3 Little Pigs and then built the three houses! We collected everything we needed first and then went to collect sticks from our woodland area for the stick house. There was SO MUCH GLUE!
- We went on a Bear Hunt! We enjoyed the story so much that we decided to go on our own bear hunt! We pulled on our wellies, zipped up our coats and braved the cold weather to squelch through oozy mud, splash through a deep, cold river, twirl through a snowstorm and creep through a dark cave. We screamed when we found a bear! We quickly decided to run back through it all and back to our classroom – safe and sound!
In the Owlets we have a class reward system. Rodney the Robot begins all broken up. When we behave well as a class we earn a piece of Rodney. Once he is all built up we get a treat. In the spring we held a Rodney Robot party with party food and party games.
In December the Owlets hosted a Christmas based Reading Café, that all parents were invited to attend.
We shared the book ‘Fancy Dress Christmas’ by Nick Sharratt in our special story tent and then all created our own Christmas fancy dress costumes to stick on photographs of ourselves.
Of course, as should always happen at a café, there were drinks and biscuits or mince pies for everyone!
