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