Home Page

The Perfect Pet

Welcome back everyone!

We hope that you have had a wonderful week at home with your families.

This half term our learning will take place around the topic of animals.

Our core text for Autumn 2 is 'Wanted: The Perfect Pet' by Fiona Roberton.

To immerse the children in our new topic we have enjoyed a trip to Blackpool Zoo where the children saw many amazing animals and have learnt a lot about what they eat, how they live and what they look like.

In Geography this half term we will be learning about the four countries of the United Kingdom. We started this unit of learning by revisiting our previous learning about our local area and talked about Nelson being a town in the country of England. We explored maps of Nelson and used geographical vocabulary to talk about the human and physical features we could see on each map.

After weeding our class planter we helped to plant lots of bulbs. We can't wait to watch the flowers grow!

In Maths we have been learning about Fractions. We explored splitting everyday whole items into equal parts.

In Design and Technology this half term we are going to design, make and evaluate an animal sliding mechanism which we'll use to create a picture of zoo animals where several animals are able to move by sliding or on a lever.

To begin this project, we looked at a range of books that have moving parts. We explored how we could make each part move and discussed how each mechanism worked.

We then practised the skills needed to make slot and slider and lever mechanisms.

Finally, we designed, made and evaluated our final product.

Over the next two weeks in English we will be retelling our core text Wanted: The Perfect Pet. This week, our focus has been on verbally retelling each part of the story. We have practised sequencing the main events by creating actions to help us remember our story and using the online platform 'Seesaw' to place pictures in the correct order and record our voices narrating the story.

We have been enjoying learning in our new outdoor classroom. This week the children played lots of maths games and used their mathematical knowledge to calculate and record their scores. The children also enjoyed using loose parts to create their own stories, characters and settings. They described their creations using descriptive language, building their vocabulary and language skills throughout.

As part of our Science topic we have enjoyed a visit from local scientist Steven Lewis Neille. Steven brought in a range of different animals for us to observe and handle, including beetles, toads and some mice. We learnt so much about what each of the animals eat, where they live and how they grow and change over time.

In preparation for our non-fiction focused writing of a setting description of a tortoise habitat, Mrs Willan brought her pet tortoise Tango in to visit us. We really enjoyed learning all about his diet, habitat and how he hibernates during winter.