Over the past few weeks, we have been learning about Christmas and the Christian traditions around it. This has helped us understand the story of the nativity, why people celebrate, and how customs like carols, gifts, and decorations have developed over time.

We performed our nativity, Whoops-a-Daisy Angel, which tells the story of the birth of baby Jesus. The children were amazing, confidently using their acting skills and musical talent to put on a wonderful performance. This work links to the Early Years Foundation Stage and National Curriculum through Expressive Arts and Design and Music, as well as English, by developing speaking, listening and performance skills. It also supports Religious Education, helping pupils to understand and retell a key Christian story, while building confidence, creativity and teamwork.

 Robin class visited Bishops Palace to see our winning entry into the Eco Art Competition. The theme was 'Christmas Carols' and we won the award for Creative Interpretation of the Theme. Each class created 3D sculptures of the characters from different Christmas Carols, each singing their own song. We took inspiration from the artist Robert Bradford who recycles and reuses unusual objects to create art. Robin class created a donkey from the Carol, 'Little Donkey.'

The following week, we joined our whole school to enjoy a visit to The Playhouse Theatre in Weston-super-Mare, watching the pantomime Cinderella. We joined in enthusiastically, cheering and booing in all the right places. Everyone had a fantastic time!

Our Christmas card designs were inspired by our love of textures, something we’ve been exploring and experimenting with in our sketchbooks. We started by creating vibrant colour collages to form the backgrounds, then layered printed patterns on top to add depth. Finally, we added a festive focal point, a Christmas or winter symbol. Each scene became a layered artwork for the front of our Christmas cards, ready to send to our families.

We made candle wreaths using natural materials cut from plants and trees on our school grounds, and the Christmas tree. These were taken home as gifts for our families. 

 Maths - Both year groups have been exploring pattern, using known shapes, and created linear and circular repeating patterns. Year 1 have been deepening their knowledge and recall of fact families using subtraction and addition maths sentences and Reception have been securing their place value knowledge, recalling, subitising and representing numbers using a range of resources. 

Writing dictated sentences using our phonic knowledge and super sentence rules helps us focus on spelling, sentence structure, vocabulary, listening skills, and writing fluency. We have been recording dictated sentences which we plan and construct as a class before independently writing them. This has had a positive impact on handwriting and the confidence to record meaningful sentences. 

The changing weather and season has been our main Science focus, connecting our understanding and observational skills of the weather to our broader understanding of seasons. We have been recording the  weather on a calendar and have written factual sentences about our learning. We have also collected natural objects on our Welly Walk, to describe a journey and compare the experience to a prior walk on the same route at the end of summer. 

Our ball control skills have been improving each week in PE with Emily, our sports coach. We have practised our kicking, catching and controlling a ball with equipment, developing our hand-eye coordination as we do so. On our final lesson, we used our skills to play dodgeball.

PHSE - Health and wellbeing. Over the past few weeks we have discussed the importance of our health and wellbeing including recognising our strengths and the impact of sleep and relaxation.