The Pirates are Coming

We have enjoyed exploring our theme of pirates in our new story ‘The Pirates are Coming’. We have loved using the vocabulary from our story in our play, and enjoyed playing in our pirate tuff tray and building pirate ships. We also dressed up as pirates! For our class assembly, we also made pirate hats to wear and wrote our own sea shanty that we performed with actions. 

For our traditional tale, we have been learning about the Three Little Pigs, and exploring construction in the story. We have loved thinking about making houses from different materials and the positives and negatives to using straw, sticks, and bricks for building.

In maths, we have been exploring the theme of ‘find my pattern’. We have looked at doubles and how to calculate these, using some pirate coins and a mirror. We have also investigated the concept of sharing and grouping, using the teddy bear picnic. 

In the latter part of this term, we have been thinking about ‘on the move’ and exploring maths through stories. We loved re-reading Mr Gummy’s Outing, Kipper’s Toy Box and Harry and his Bucketful of Dinosaurs. We have explored map making, making story maps, maps of our journey to school, treasure maps, and maps of obstacle courses (which we then created!)

We have enjoyed thinking about collaboration and turn taking in our PE lessons. We have loved working in teams and thinking about our ball skills. We were also thrilled to use the parachute in a variety of ways, including trying to run under it to the other side and playing ‘popcorn’.

During choosing time, we have been demonstrating a number of gross motor and fine motor skills, from balancing whilst walking the plank to holding our chalk in a tripod grip and writing our numbers carefully on the floor. We are so proud of the progress we have made!

Understanding the world.

We have continued our theme of planting and new life this term, planting our successful pumpkin plants in the school flower beds with the help of Mrs B our Science Lead. Our theme for this term, however, is working scientifically. Our first working scientifically focus was ‘observation’. We went out into the outdoor environment with our magnifying glasses, and used our five senses to observe what we could hear, see, smell, touch, and taste.

The other working scientifically skills we have learnt about are: recording, predicting, sorting, and identifying. We have enjoyed experiments pertaining to all these skills, particularly predicting, as it was exciting to think more about what we know and how we can use the things we know to help us make predictions.

We have absolutely adored our pirate theme this term. We have learnt new pirate vocabulary, which we’ve enjoyed using in our play (such as calling each other seadog and shark bait!) We were also excited to learn more about new famous pirates that really existed, such as Blackbeard and Anne Bonny. We were proud to do our class assembly about pirates and tell our parents and the rest of the school everything we had learnt.

In RE, we have been focusing on God’s Wonderful World, and the things that we wonder about the world. We have also spoken about how we can look after the world, such as not wasting water by turning the taps off after we have used them. We loved our first prayer afternoon! We went to year 1 and year 2 to prayer and came back to our classroom to write down what we are thankful for and putting our water tray whilst we prayed to God to say thank you.

In computing this term, we have been learning about how we can stay safe online, like Smartie the Penguin. We know if we see something that is worrying or upsetting online we must go and tell an adult straightaway. Stop, think, and tell someone!

We were lucky enough to have a visit in the morning from a real life Time Traveller, Pirate Ellie! We went back in time with her to when Blackbeard was alive and played lots of different pirate games, learnt parts of a pirate ship, played true or false fact games (to learn about pirates favourite food and drink for example), and many more fun activities. In the afternoon, we made some pirate biscuits, found a treasure map and found the treasure, made some of our own treasure maps, and lots more. We absolutely loved being pirates for a day!