Having fun with one of our many phonics games in our outdoor area.

This term our topic has been all about Selby. We have learnt all about our local area using maps to compare how the locality has changed over time. As a class we have studied old and new photographs, compared them and used different words to describe them such as 'past', 'present' and 'future'. With Year 2, we walked into Selby visiting the Toll Bridge, the Park, Selby Abbey, the Library and St. Mary's Church. It was an amazing day, some of our parents shared the day with us too. We found out facts about the history of Selby and important places such as The Abbey. 

In Literacy we made a list of all the materials we needed to make our own boats. Then we made a boat each before labelling the features, followed by writing a caption to accompany our boats. We improved our boats before painting them and compared them to what our friend had made.

We have had a busy half term. After Christmas our topic is 'Santa's Little Helpers', check back later to find out what we have all been up to!

Thomas showing his labelled boat prior to painting.

We have now moved into Year 1 and are loving exploring both the indoor and outdoor environment. Mrs Beech, Mrs Sykes and Mrs Riley are our teachers and we have had a lot of fun in our colourful classroom.

We are learning all about Selby at the moment. Last week we walked into town and visited many places such as the Toll Bridge, Selby Park, The Library, Selby Abbey and St Mary's Church. We had a brilliant time finding out all about how our local town has changed over the years. 

In RE we have listened to the creation story, we have been thinking about how the world was made and how lucky we are to live in such a beautiful place. We worked fabulously together to create our own worlds in small groups.

We are also spending time learning how to play some amazing phonics games too, we particularly are enjoying the ones outside where we get to use the water guns! 

Come into class and look at our stained glass windows, pictures of our favourite places in the world, leaf drawings and many other things.

We are of course working hard on our literacy targets which will help us improve our writing and our SMIRF. What is your SMIRF?

We are looking forward to seeing what else we are going to find out about while we continue on our journey through Year 1. Keep checking back to see what we are up to!

Using the water station in the Year 1 outdoor Learning Area.

On a beautiful sunny day we were treated to a fabulous end to our Katie Morag/Scottish day - we were visited by a real 'Flying Scotsman'. It was a wonderful way to finish our very exciting day making Scottish food, perfecting our Scottish dance, creating our own tartan and building extensive islands. Our surprise visitor certainly helped to improve our dance moves - he played his bagpipes and we jiggly wiggled with joy in the warm sunshine. After piping in our haggis, our piper finished his visit by performing for all the other classes in school too. It certainly was a great day that we will all remember and a brilliant way to celebrate all of our hard work on the topic. 

Scottish dancing in the Spring sunshine

At the start of the year, we had a wonderful week learning all about the story of The Good Samaritan and about the work of Mother Teresa, a person who lived her life following this teaching of Jesus.

Mother Teresa said "Let's always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love".

So we created a prayer station with pictures of us all smiling and we encouraged everyone else to greet each other with a smile. At the end of the week all the prayer stations were brought into the hall and we had a wonderful time sitting praying at each one. After that we took the prayer stations to church, where all our church community was able to share in the reflection.

Quiet prayer at our prayer station

Reception WOW DayWell here we all are at the start of a new year - all 32 of us! We have settled well and are making lots of new friends. We have especially enjoyed getting to know our Year 6 buddies. Mrs Rogerson has also come to join Mrs Mabley and Mrs Bean to help us with our learning. Because we love making castles and dressing up as princesses and knights, our first WOW day was a magical one!  The photo shows us dressed in our fabulous costumes. We had a brilliant time creating fairytale castles, making potions and wands and we even finished the day with a dragon hunt! We are very enthusiastic about learning new things and try to keep going when we find things tricky!