This afternoon we were busy building islands out of playdough. This was such a good assessment tool to see any misconceptions about islands – ‘they are always in the sea’ or ‘islands have palm trees and coconuts’. We found some islands on the map of the European continent and then we looked at some landlocked countries.

As part of our bird collage project we explored printing with a range of fruits and vegetables this morning. We used complementary colours to achieve maximum contrast in our designs and they turned out so well! We are going to be using these patterned papers to create 3D collage birds in a few weeks time.

Following on from our fruit tasting we thought we would take our observational drawing to the next level with an invitation to create a still life of the fruit. We used a mix of mediums – oil pastels, pencils, coloured pencils and watercolours to explore different texture and effects.

What an exciting day in Reception with a visit from Sam’s Safari. We learnt so much about many creatures from all over the world. We found the continents and countries on the world map and were able to touch many of the creatures. We watched the Armadillo having his breakfast and a tortoise demolishing an apple! The salamander felt so smooth with his wet skin and the chinchilla was the softest thing we’ve seen!

After their visit we were very motivated to share our knowledge and label an animal of our choice in our Science books!

On Monday our classroom looked a little bit different with the arrival of our safari storytelling tent! During our story map creation time we’ve been very busy writing our own tales about princesses with rainbow hair, superheroes on the move, pirates who disappear and stolen pomegranates. Lots of us have been writing stories at home too and we’ve loved sharing these at the end of the day!

As our hook for our Handa’s Surprise topic we tasted a few different fruits and vegetables to help us start to think about some adjectives for describing them!

We thought the limes were very ‘sour’, the avocado was ‘creamy’ and the pineapple was ‘sweet’.

We’ve been diving into our Science this week in Year 1, looking at our first two categories of animals – mammals and birds. We sorted animals into ‘mammals’ and ‘not mammals’ and produced some fantastic labelled diagrams in our books in a multitude of different styles! In our learning about birds we’ve encountered lots of tricky vocabulary – ‘waterfowl’, ‘raptors’ and ‘cygnets’ amongst some vocabulary we discussed!

In provision, we’ve been building mammals in the playdough area; printing with carrots and drawing mammals using the shapes and creating animal print patterns in our art books.

What a fantastic first week in 1TH getting stuck into our first topic of Animal Kingdom and spending lots of time playing with our friends again after a long summer apart and playing team games to work on our collaboration skills.

Using wax resist to create animal type prints