Lights, camera, action……
This Sunday marks the start of Advent, the preparation for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ at Christmas.
The Nativity story is one of the most famous stories from the Christian religion.
It is that time of year where we become completely immersed in our retelling of the Nativity. The stage is out ready, costumes are being fitted, songs are being sung and lines are being delivered with confidence. We have been very impressed with some of the acting skills and perhaps we have raised aspirations for some to become future performers! As for me…… I am being a typical stage director (and I love it!!).
The headline of this post is lights, camera, action and of course that is a reference to all the acting we have been doing but also because light is significant in many beliefs and religions. It is very symbolic in the Christian faith and we will be learning about this in more detail next week with the bright light in the sky in the Nativity and the lighting of the candle during our Christingle service next Thursday.
We don’t want to give too much away about the performance - we want to build the anticipation in readiness for the performance…….we will just have to keep you waiting for a little longer.
This week
The rain certainly didn’t dampen our spirits this week and although the children started the week with wet playtimes, they focused well and enjoyed discussing their experiences of the wind and rain “It nearly blew our fence down!”
Early years begun the week exploring parts and whole, recognising when something was a part and when something was a whole. We explored this through Tap Tap Art, working together to build a whole picture using lots of smaller parts.
In the rainforest the children loved our new mark making activity, where they followed along the different lines to create hairstyles. As one child was completing the activity they said “Mrs Brown, this is your hair”, I glanced down to see a mirror image of myself….on a bad hair day! I blame the weather!
Year One explored further the part whole model this week, building on their understanding and moving onto using their part whole model to create a number sentence. We explored the meaning of the + (plus) sign and the = (equals) sign, this was a challenging step for us but we all worked extremely hard to use our part whole model to support our learning.
After recapping on the ‘chair’ events of last week in Science, we moved onto exploring how different properties of a materials make it suitable for a given purpose. Working in teams with Kingfishers we all had a hidden object in a bag that we needed to explore, creating a mind map of its properties, and discussing what situations we might use our object. We all then moved around the room and used each other’s mind maps to predict what the object might be within the bag. After much investigating we discussed that we all in fact had shoes in our bags but each with a different purpose, from a slipper to a flipper to a roller skate, we discovered that although the object was the same, the materials used to make them made them fit for purpose!
The week continued with a surprise new item for our reception children which was met with “Wow, it’s the best thing ever!”….this best thing ever was in fact a large wooden dolls house which the children have absolutely loved exploring. “Where are the stairs?” one child asked and then quickly used their imagination to create stairs, another was also very impressed by an item they found downstairs…. “It even has a television!” Needless to say the dolls house was a firm favourite within our rainforest.
In our design and technology lesson this week, we continued learning about pop-up mechanisms and moved onto making our cut out shape mechanism which, in aid of the festive season, was a gingerbread man! Despite this being a challenging activity, the children showed great resilience and kept persevering, they loved seeing the outcome of their efforts.
Our reception children continued to explore colour mixing, recapping on the activity for the previous week and using this knowledge to help them mix paints to make a rainbow. The children loved exploring the different colours and rainbows were very popular this week due to seeing one earlier in the day!
In our Topic learning, we continued to find out more about Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators! We retold the story of the Gunpowder Plot using our story maps from last week. There was much discussion and collaboration to be had! We also understood that this significant event happened in 1605, over 400 years ago and is therefore not within our living memory.
