Oak Class - YR and Y1

Welcome to Oak Class!

Happy new year!

Happy 2020, we hope you all had a great Christmas, we can't wait to find out about what you have been up to!

For the first week back we will be taking part in the whole school Take One Picture week. We will be using Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird by Frida Kahlo. We will be looking at what makes us special and unique and using the book Elmer to create a class art collage made up of our own self-portraits. 

Our Spring term topic is On the Farm. We will be having lots of fun learning about farm animals and farms around the world. We will end our topic with a trip to Stonehurst Farm which is a fantastic, traditional farm... it is Mrs Harrod's favourite ever trip! 

Please find our topic web for Spring term below. 

Blackberry picking in the woods and making blackberry and apple crumble

On Thursday we went into the woods and picked some juicy blackberries. We all had great fun! Back in class we did some big counting, we counted out 100 and then used that to estimate that we had picked around 700 blackberries! We also picked some apples (with Mrs Harrod's help!). Then on Friday morning we had a lovely morning using our freshly picked ingredients to make blackberry and apple crumble. They smelt delicious! Please enjoy the pictures below. 

Autumn Term

Welcome to all our new children and welcome back to the grown up year 1s! We are very excited to get started with a brand new school year and hope you've all had a lovely summer, I am very excited to hear all about what you've been up to! 

After a few weeks settling into school, we will begin our Autumn term topic which is Where we live. We will thinking about our homes and where we are in the UK then we will be comparing it to lives around the world. Our first book that we will be using will be Stick Man by Julia Donaldson . Please find the topic web for Autumn term below, giving a broad outline of what we will cover in Oak class. 

Our trip to Underwood Church

In preparation for our visit to Southwell Minster next week, we have been finding out about the features of a church. To help us with this we met Reverend Stevenson at Underwood Church who told us about the church. We particularly enjoyed finding the font and the pulpit. 

Sponsored Spring Clean

Wow... so far Oak class have raised £201! We had a fantastic afternoon. A HUGE thank you for all our volunteers who got stuck in, we really appreciate it and the children really enjoyed having you in school for the afternoon too. Please enjoy the photos below. 

Recycling workshop from Ashfield District Council and a visit from a bin lorry

Wow what an exciting morning we have had! We learnt all about what happens to our rubbish and how important it is to use the correct bins. We even had the chance to see how a bin lorry works. 

Identifying trees and beautiful bluebells!

This afternoon we all worked very hard to find out what trees we have in our woodland area. We worked in pairs to collect leaves and used different charts to identify the trees. We were also amazed that the beautiful bluebells have bloomed over the Easter holidays! Enjoy the photographs below...

Summer Term

I hope you're all having a fantastic Easter break and enjoying the beautiful weather. This term our topic is 'Once upon a time...' we will be using different traditional tales throughout the term starting with Jack and the Beanstalk. Our first science topic this term will be plants where we will be planting our own beans, I wonder if any will be magic beans?!

Please find our topic web below. 

Capacity Puddles!

This morning we looked at different containers filled with water. We worked in groups to decide how big of a puddle would be created from the water contained in each one. Then we drew the puddle size and tested to see if they were close. Some fantastic discussions were taking place using great mathematical language to compare the size of the containers. 

Pancake Day!

We have learnt all about Shrove Tuesday and had lots of fun with pancakes today. We worked in groups to make the batter and Mr Jones showed us how to cook them... a HUGE thank you to Mr Jones for this! They were delicious!!

Can you believe Mr Walton doesn't know how to make pancakes? Luckily, we have been learning all about instructions in Literacy so we will write him some instructions for how to make a pancake. 

In the afternoon we had pancake races and had a 'how many pancake flips can you do in one minute?' competition. Thomas won with over 70.... WOW!!!

Using our senses

This week we have been learning all about our bodies and how we use our senses. We had lots of fun playing guess the jelly flavour using our sense of smell at first, and then by taste. We also learnt about types of taste and tasted something salty, bitter, sweet and sour. Tasting the lemon was a particular highlight! 

Spring term 

Happy new year and welcome back to Oak class- we hope you had a fantastic Christmas holiday and are all looking forward to a brand new term in Oak.

Before we start our main topic for this term, we will be taking part in the whole school Take One Picture week. The whole weeks learning will be based around one famous painting, this year we will be looking at The Castle of Muiden  in Winter by Jan Beerstraaten. We will be looking at the features of castles as well as making our own clay tower. 

Toys

Throughout Spring term we will be learning about Toys. We are very excited about this topic and have lots of exciting things coming up! The main themes we are aiming to cover throughout this topic can be found on the Toys Topic Web below. 

Orienteering Day

Wow! What a chilly but fantastic day we've had today. We took part in different orienteering challenges as well as some team work competitions. In the afternoon we had some super help from the year 6s who helped us use maps of our woodland areas to play some hide and seek games. Please enjoy the photos below. 

Children in Need

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who donated on Friday for Children in Need. We raised over £600 which is 3 times our target of £200! 

Oak Class worked incredibly hard to organise a cake sale, made picture frames to sell and the whole school took part in a Dance-a-thon which was a lot of fun! 

Let's GLOW!

It was a very windy first Let's GLOW of the year but we all had lots of fun! Thank you to everyone who joined us throughout the day, please enjoy the photos below... 

Crazy about conkers!

We have been really enjoying playing with conkers recently. Enjoy the photos below from some of our outdoor sessions this week. Some children worked together to make a conker rolling game, they even decided to use number cards to make a scoring system. 

Wow what a fantastic start to the year! We have had a very busy start getting to know each other and learning about our indoor and outdoor classroom. We will soon be starting our topic which is Holidays, thank you so much for all your summer holiday homework, we are going to be using everything that has been brought in to make a holiday class book. 

This Is Me

In Oak class we love singing! We sing everyday, several times a day. Recently our favourite song has been This Is Me from The Greatest Showman. On Friday, we performed to the rest of the school and taught them our actions. Please enjoy the video below. 

Summer 2

Welcome back to the last half term of this year! This half term is a very busy, but exciting one with lots happening. We will be learning all about Transport this half term, please find the topic web below with an outline of our learning. This half term the children will have a big role to play in terms of where our learning journey will take us, we will start this half term by thinking carefully about what we already know about transport and what we would like to find out. We will then be using this to think about questions we would like to investigate throughout the half term. 

I am very excited for our 2 class trips this half term; our first trip will take us to Southwell Minster where we will be taking part in their annual Time Travelling event which is always very exciting. Our second trip will be to Butterley Rail Station where we will board a train which will take us to Swanwick Junction where we will learn all about trains from the past and help us to understand how transport has changed. 

How big is a blue whale?

We have been finding out about blue whales, the world's largest animal! We decided to try and make an actual size drawing on the playground so we had to do lots of research using the internet to find out measurements of different body parts. The hardest part was trying to fit the whole whale into one photograph...

Bagthorpe's Royal Wedding

Wednesday 16th May 2018

To celebrate the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle we have had one of our very own. Every member of Oak and Birch class got to choose a role they would like to play at the wedding from photographer, to page-boy, flower girl to father of the bride - we had it all! Then year 1 and 2 made and wrote invitations for Foundation children to come as guests; and on the afternoon of Wednesday 16th it all started getting very exciting.

We had Mr Walton playing the wedding march on the piano as Meghan and her father walked down the aisle of the school hall elaborately decorated with Union Jacks, bunting and rose trees. The ceremony, signing of the register and then of course a fabulous Wedding Breakfast and dancing to top it all off. Take a look at a selection of our photos taken by photoraphers Gracie-Mai, Noah and Fynn and some from Mrs Harrod and Mrs Jenner-Dyer too. And don't forget to look at Birch's class page too for even more images of the big day!  

Brown Bear videos

We have been learning all about Brown Bears and have learnt an information text. We worked in small groups and used our computer skills to record the text in the style of a nature documentary! All children worked extremely well, and used Adobe Spark to create these brilliant videos. Please see below to enjoy and let us know what you think. 

We are now going to be learning all about the largest creature in the world... what could that be??  

Animals

We have been very busy in Oak class learning all about different animals that live near us including pets. In our different pet groups, we looked at information leaflets from Pets at Home and decided we could make some child friendly leaflets. Pets at Home even said we could put our leaflets and posters in their store! Each group shared what they already know and researched any additional information they needed before designing and making their own leaflet or poster. 

In Maths, we have been measuring length and weight. We have really enjoyed the fantastic book Actual Size and measured out the size of some animals from the book. Please enjoy the photos below... we particularly liked measuring out the length of a giant squid which is 18 metres long!!

Our Animals topic will be continuing after Easter for a couple of weeks when we will be looking at animals from different countries. It has been great seeing so much homework, please remember the challenges are optional. You can find the Animals topic web and homework challenges below. 

Votes for Women!!

In the last week of this half term, Oak class were furious when the boys were allowed to vote for decisions in class but the girls were not! We learnt all about Emmeline Pankhurst and decided to have a protest of our own (We even made the front page of the newspaper!!). Luckily Mr Walton changed his mind and the girls were allowed their votes for the rest of the week. All the children took their votes seriously and thoroughly enjoyed learning about the 100 year anniversary of votes for women. Please enjoy the photos below. 

What a great start to 2018! We have been very busy in Oak class for the first week back looking at the painting 'Surprised!' by Henri Rousseau. We thought a lot about different jungle creatures and even went on a jungle trek. 

Our main topic this half term is going to be Homes: Where we live. This will be starting with a focus on the brilliant book On the Way Home by Jill Murphy. We will then explore lots of information about homes and where we live. 

We have sent home some suggestions for homework activities this half term. Please see the document below. 

PE sessions remain on a Friday, children will need their indoor PE kit for gymnastics with Mr Smith. 

A big WELL DONE to everyone who completed the 12 days of Christmas Reading Challenge! Please continue to read as much as you can at home, it really does make a huge difference. 

Guy Fawkes Week

This week we have been busy learning all about Bonfire night, why we celebrate and how to celebrate safely. 

We discussed why it is very important to be safe when using sparklers and at the end of the week gave Mrs Harrod instructions to use her sparkler safely.

Throughout the week we also looked at the artist Andy Goldsworthy who uses natural materials. During Muddy Monday we created big firework pictures in the style of Andy Goldsworthy and then in the classroom made some more pictures. Lots of learning took place as we created our pictures by ourselves and then recorded what we had done by taking a photograph and making sure we had found our name label to 'sign' our pictures too! Please enjoy the photos below...

Autumn 2

This half term is always a busy one in Oak class but it is always our favourite! With the run up to Christmas we get very busy very quickly learning our Nativity songs. Please find below this half terms topic web which includes some important Christmas dates.

PE this half term will be on Fridays, we are doing a dance unit up until Christmas so children will need their indoor PE kits. 

Muddy Mondays will continue and as it is getting colder, children may want to bring extra layers for the afternoon.

This first half term is all about settling in and getting to know each other. Our first topic is based on the popular book We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen. For an overview of what we are aiming to do, please take a look at the topic web and newsletter for this half term below.