The children have really enjoyed learning using The Egg Box Dragon. This ended with them designing and making their own egg box models. The children learned so much about joining materials, axels, finishing and instructions. Their finished models are absolutely amazing. 

Hi there,

I am Miss Hawkins, a student teacher from Plymouth university who is going to be working in Squirrels class for four weeks this term this term and four weeks in the summer term. 

I’ve been enjoying getting to know the children this week and am looking forward to teaching them getting to know them more in the coming weeks. 

Squirrels have had such a busy term and when you look through the pictures you will see smiles all round. 

Squirrels had a fabulous time in their first 'Real PE' lesson. They were learning about having a stable one legged balance through skills challenges and games. They were being pirates and played a great game called Popping Pirates! There was some super partner work and teamwork going on as well as children challenging themselves to get better. 

Today we went to the woods to search for different sorts of fungi. We found lots of different types in all sorts of places. We know not to touch them so we took photographs instead. 

Squirrels have been so busy already. This week they were introduced to the book Beegu which is about a small alien who crash landed on Earth. The children have made aliens, painted aliens, designed and made spaceships and written about what they think Beegu might say about Earth. They have set up our building site and enjoyed exploring that. This week we had our first dance session of the year as well as a drumming workshop. The Year Ones are settling in brilliantly and the Year Twos have been helping out and enjoying all of their learning. 

We had our teddy bears picnic in the woods. The children enjoyed using their adventure bags for the first time to carry their cuddly friends. When they got to the woods they found it decorated with the teddy bunting that they made and lots of picnic blankets. The Year Twos  had made teddy shaped jam sandwiches for snack and some children helped to make potato salad and pasta salad on the fire; including herbs from the school garden. At 11:30 we were joined by some young visitors and had our fish and chips in the forest. Nikki even made us teddy shaped biscuits for pudding. We enjoyed reading stories about bears, making teddy dens and playing with our friends in the woods. It was a lovely picnic.

We have been developing our science skills through exploring puddles. We used our prediction and observation skills as well as collaboration and problem solving to carry out our experiment. We learned that the playground has a slope, that a small container makes a small puddle and a large container makes a large puddle and that is the puddles got smaller in the sun after a while. It was lots of fun.