December

December was a busy month for us.

We had a successful ARC trip to Plymouth Theatre to see Raymond Briggs 'Father Christmas'. It even snowed in the theatre. The children enjoyed the show and there was much laughter throughout. 

As this was the Christmas Term, we looked at why Christmas is important to Christians. We discovered that for Christians, Advent is a time for preparing for Christmas and each candle as it is lit represents Faith, Hope, Peace, and Joy. The final one is the joy that Jesus was born. 

We also completed our Science module 'Animals including humans'. We looked at what is needed to keep animals and humans healthy and alive including exercise. 

December was full of Art and craft including making prints from our Literacy topic - books from Julia Donaldson. 

We enjoyed making our own Christmas tree, Christingle, decorations and Christmas cards.

And of course, much fun and laughter was had as we enjoyed our Christmas dinner, lovely food, crackers and our own hats that we made.

We hope you have a lovely Christmas and a Happy New Year.

We started the festive season with a special delivery of a Christmas tree which the children helped decorate. Our story focus at the beginning of the month was ‘The Christmas Pine’ by Julia Donaldson which retells the journey of the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square. We shared photos of our own Christmas trees from home and the children confidently spoke about their own trees and decorations.

Our role play areas of a Post Office and Santa’s workshop gave the children an opportunity to play out different roles and improve communication with their peers whilst sharing their own experiences from home.

Lots of Christmas crafting took place where we made cards, collages and decorations as well as reindeer food to take home for Christmas Eve.

We practised our pencil control using festive stencils and used our pincer grips to peel stickers and decorate Christmas trees.

We learnt about the true meaning of Christmas by reading Rod Campbell’s ‘My First Nativity’, along with a small world nativity scene and matching game to expand their learning and vocabulary.

There was some great hand-eye coordination on display with our sensory tuff trays; mixing up a foam Santa, scooping a cereal Christmas pudding and making fragrant Christmas ‘tea’.

We also read ‘Stickman’ and made our own stick people from twigs we collected in the garden and play dough. 

After a wild and stormy weekend, it has been a calm start to the week! A big thanks to you all for supporting our Rainbow Multi day on Friday. We had some generous and innovative coloured items and we are busy putting them together to make some gift hampers  (take a look at the photograph of the red hamper above.)  We will be raffling these on the final day of school with proceeds going towards some sensory equipment which we are going to install in a special space at school.This can be used if pupils need a quiet space to be calm if they are feeling angry/anxious and the classroom environment is just too noisy/bright/busy for them. Personally, I am currently favouring the purple hamper as it has lots of purple themed chocolate!
Thank you also to those of you who braved the winds on Sunday to have breakfast with Santa. There was a lovely festive atmosphere and the children (and the adults too!) enjoyed meeting Santa in his special grotto which has magically transformed back into the Infant school's stage- those elves must have been busy yesterday! Over £280 was raised by this event. This will also be used to furnish sensory spaces in both schools. 
We are looking forward to the Key Stage One production this Thursday and the postponed Carol singing at the Rifle Volunteer on Saturday 14th December at 4.00pm.

We returned from the Autumn half term and kicked off a busy November with some Halloween celebrations. The children worked collaboratively to follow a spooky recipe in the home corner, using their counting and number recognition skills. We also enjoyed looking at Halloween books and shared our own experiences from home.

This busy month also saw Bonfire Night. We made marks in a glittery tuff tray, copying patterns and creating some bright firework artwork using cardboard rolls.

We celebrated Remembrance Day learning about brave soldiers and using vegetables to print some poppy pictures. In our tuff tray we used various tools to scoop and weigh poppy coloured rice.

Children In Need gave the children an opportunity to engage in lots of Pudsey themed activities including lemon scented tuff trays and playdough.

We learnt about Road Safety, putting an emphasis on how the colours of the traffic lights give us instructions and help keep us safe.  We also spoke about 2D shapes and their properties using cars to move around different shaped tracks.

It's beginning to look a lot like you know what!

It is starting to look a little bit festive at the Infant and Nursery School. Rehearsals are in full swing for the KS1 end of term Christmas production- 'Christmas With The Aliens!' The children have been absolute stars and some have leant their lines already. Thank you to parents/carers for rehearsing with them. 
A reminder that there are parental consultation meetings next week. You can make an appointment with your child's teacher via Seesaw. 
Thank you to those of you who came to the Christmas Kahoot Evening. Great fun was had by all and it was wonderful to see so many of you in attendance. A huge thanks to Dave Cunningham of Dave's Chip Stop who provided the food at such a generous discount.
Please see below for our fundraising newsletter which details how much money has be raised so far and what we have spent it on/intend to spend it on. 
You should have received information about the 'Breakfast With Santa' event being held at the Infant and Nursery Base on Saturday 7th December. We hope to see as many of you there as possible.
We are looking forward to the Rainbow Mufti event on Friday 6th December. See Seesaw for more details.

October has been another busy month in Y2.

In maths we have been learning how to add and subtract ones, tens and two digit numbers. We are also learning about number bonds on a weekly basis as this forms the foundation for all of our number work. We are making sure we know them off by heart.

Literacy was all about the traditional story, 'The Lion and the Mouse'. We had fun getting to know the story really well and looking at the sentence structures in the story before changing the story slightly to include our own ideas.
We are very imaginative in Y2!

In art we sorted colours of paper and selected the correct colours to represent flames. We used this to make a background for our Great Fire of London collages. Then we looked carefully at Tudor houses and their features before arranging black strips of card onto our backgrounds to make Tudor houses.

In computing, we have been learning to use a drawing programme. We can now select different colours, different sized brushes and draw shapes and fill them. Have a look at our wonderful creations!

Science has been fun this month learning about materials. We learnt about the properties of different materials and how they are used. Then we used what we learnt to undertake a bridge building challenge. We were able to talk about what worked, what didn't and why.
We have also had fun investigating which materials are waterproof. We then used what we found out to design a waterproof coat.

Just before half term we really enjoyed a visit from the fire brigade who were able to tell us how they fight fires now so that we could compare it to how they fought fires in The Great Fire of London.

This month we have been learning more about materials and been testing their properties. We loved seeing what would float and sink and which materials would soak up liquids.
In art we completed our final drawing of our 'Wild Things' after trying out lots of ideas in our sketch books.
We completed our learning for our Big Question of 'Where on Earth are we?' We found our school and our homes on an aerial photograph and traced the flow of the local river. On World Mental Health Day we dressed in yellow and took part in activities that can support keeping our minds healthy such as yoga.
We finished the half term with a lovely Forest School session where the children lit fires and had some yummy hot chocolate.

We started off October continuing to look for signs of Autumn, collecting leaves from the wider school environment and then matching them to a Leaf Identification sheet. Using some of the leaves we collected, we made Autumn crowns and wore them when singing our favourite seasonal song ‘Autumn leaves are falling down.’

We rolled conkers and pine cones in trays to create paint effects on paper leaves. 

For World Mental Health Awareness Day we enjoyed a ‘Colour Monster’ themed tuff tray and spoke about colours and feelings. With the colour theme of the day being Yellow, we attempted to find yellow items across nursery, working together to fill a tuff tray. We read ‘Sometimes I Feel Sunny’ which explores the emotions that naturally occur in every young child's life.

We enjoyed a visit from the Fire Brigade and enthusiastically looked around the fire engine, which was the perfect fit for our children’s interest fire station area.

For Harvest Festival we learnt about food and where it comes from whilst playing the role of customers and shop keeper in our farm shop. We also made bread rolls and demonstrated great turn taking adding ingredients and mixing, as well as handling tools and using rolling pins.

We kicked off some early Diwali celebrations, tasting some delicious Malaysian food and smelling lots of different spices. We used scented playdough and decorated with Marigold flowers to create some fun festive designs. 

In the library we looked at the works of our current school author, Julia Donaldson, exploring her many books and characters and listening to our favourite stories.

October

We have had a lovely Autumn October. In Science we have been looking at Seasonal changes. 
During this time we looked at how the weather can change too. By making a Water Gauge and Wind Vane we were able to make observations throughout the week. We also took a look at the daily temperature. 

To check out the strength of the wind we created our own kites. We noticed that on the day we decided to trial them the wind had died down but had moments of gusty wind. At those times the kites lifted into the sky. 

The temperature stayed between 15 - 17C and our rainfall rose from 5cm upto 20 cm by the end of our observations. 

Throughout October we managed two Autumn walks, finding red, orange and yellow leaves. The walk was a peaceful one with the sounds of birds singing and a few last butterflies fluttering around. It was great finding the Wind turbine and watching the blades go round.

It will soon be Halloween, have a lovely halfterm and spooky halloween!

We’ve had a busy September in nursery getting to know our new children and making new friends. We started the month talking about ourselves and our likes and dislikes and made collages that reflected our individual personalities.

We introduced the season of Autumn and discussed what we already know and what we’d like to learn. To help extend our understanding we have decorated and sent home Autumn treasure bags so we can collect items and return to nursery to show our friends.

We promoted our British values by using a voting system to choose our children’s interest role play area – the most votes went to a Fire station.

We introduced tooth brushing in nursery to promote good oral health and the children have done a great job keeping their teeth clean.

What a brilliant start to Y2 the children have made!

We started by discussing the rules every day in the first week so that we are really clear on what is expected of us.
Lots of us are already earning certificates for showing our school values in different ways.

In our English work, we have been looking at 'The Diary of a Wombat' and picking out the features of diaries.
We linked this to our 'Great Fire of London' topic and finished the unit by writing a diary of 'Maureen' the rat, who was an eye witness in the Great Fire. 

Maths has been mainly about place value, reading, writing and comparing numbers. We have started each lesson with daily counting in twos, fives and tens.

In History, we have learnt about the events of the Great Fire, why and how it happened. We have compared fire fighting equipment, past and present and also tried to place events on a timeline. We are very much looking forward to the fire brigade visiting us in a couple of weeks so that we can learn about how fires are dealt with nowadays.

What a fantastic start the school year. The children in Year One are settling in so well and are showing so many of our school values through their work and play.
Our first 'Big Question' is 'Where on Earth are we?'. We have been learning to find the United Kingdom on maps and globes and have been learning some key facts about the four countries that make it up. We have also learnt about the county that we live in and how to find it on a map of the UK.

In the last week we have begun 'The Big Brush Club'. This is an NHS initiative to help improve children's oral health. The children have really enjoyed having a brush-along to Hey Duggee or Danny Go's tooth-brushing songs. They are getting used to the routines and know how to keep their toothbrushes clean.

In art, the children have been using their sketchbooks to try out drawing different kinds of line. They have looked at the work of Maurice Sendak (author and illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are) and have thought about how he uses different kinds of line to show the texture of hair, scales, teeth and claws. The children also did some printing with autumnal colours in order to enter the art competition at Callington Honey Fair.

We have been learning about materials in science and have been learning some of the more scientific vocabulary we can use to describe their properties such as transparent, opaque, absorbent, flexible and rigid.

The children have continued to love our daily Drawing Club sessions. These magical sessions allow the children to enjoy wonderful stories, learn some new vocabulary and write number and sentences codes in order to bring aspects of their drawings to life. It is so much fun and the children are wonderful code-creators.

In maths we have thoroughly explored numbers to 10. Through out 'Mastering Number' sessions we have practised subitising and partitioning skills and through our mathematics sessions we have learnt to read, write, order, compare and draw numbers on the number line. This is an excellent foundation for our next step into addition and subtraction.

In our COOL time (Choose Our Own Learning), many of the children have particularly enjoyed creating their own wonderful settings using the wooden blocks. The have created homes for the Wizard from one of our stories and many different animal homes. Their verbal explanations have been so detailed and so much thought has gone into the way they have been built. It has been great to watch the children work so cooperatively and communicate so well to share their ideas for moving the models forwards.

Welcome Back!

We are looking forward to another year of learning here in the ARC. We said our sad goodbye's to Joe and Dawid at the end of last term and we are very happy to welcome Leo, our newest member into the ARC. Leo will be joining us on Tuesdays and Thursdays initially until he can transition into the school full time. 


This term is all about learning new routines. The children have been practicing their independent skills with their new TEACCH stations. TEACCH is a system where the children complete a number of tasks independently. The boys are proud of their independent work and they begin to use these skills at other times in the day.  

In our Literacy, we have been focusing on fairy tales. We have learnt the stories of The Gingerbread Man, Three Billy Goat's Gruff, The Little Red Hen and Little Red Riding Hood. Our cooking sessions have been linked to these stories and we have enjoyed reading and  following  the recipes to create our delicious bakes; so far this month we have made Mr Wolf's Pancakes, cupcakes for granny, gingerbread men and a goat's cheese bridge. Can you guess which stories the recipes have come from? 

We have linked PSHE with art and we have been using sticks and stones to make our families. We have been exploring all the things that make us special. Belonging to our different families ( home and school) helps us to feel special!

This month we have been able to complete lots of our activities as a team. RJ and Jake worked together to create the ARC family picture. Eddie has been extra kind when he sings Freddie's favourite songs. 

In science we are learning about the seasons. Mrs Cansdale combined this with her Geography topic which is about our local environment and following maps. Last week the children had a great walk out to the Tamar Valley Centre. It was great to notice the leaves on the trees, explore the different creatures that were about and Jake loved exploring the wind turbines.