This week Robins are reading a book called ‘Dragon Post’.  The story is about a boy called Alex and his pet Dragon.  Unfortunately, the Dragon keeps burning objects and so Alex writes a letter to the Fire Service to ask for help.

Robins have been learning about the job of a firefighter and today, we were lucky enough to have a real life firefighter come to our classroom to visit us and to teach us about fire safety. Mr Laing made the afternoon a lot of fun and we even got to wear his helmet and have a go at using a fire extinguisher too!

Do you recognise our firefighter?

What a lovely way to start a day! Lots of grown ups reading to us and also listening to us read to them. This happens every Wednesday morning in our classroom and it is something we look forward to.   Here are a few photographs from last week.

From making our own ice lollies to drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows, Robins have had a fun-filled and busy start to the year. We launched our topic ‘Fire and Ice’ with an amazing Wow day where we made beautiful snowflakes, caused volcanoes to erupt, used a variety of media to make giant flames and played ‘ice’ hockey too. Robins have settled in very well to their new routines and are already making super progress. In our English lessons, we have been looking at explorers, reading a book entitled ‘The Great Explorer’ by Chris Judge. We even had a go at hot-seating in a drama lesson and two of the characters came to visit our classroom (see the photos). We have made parachutes, drawn our own numberlines outside in maths lessons and have been dancing like penguins. We have also sorted clothes into those that you would wear in a hot country and those which are more appropriate for a cold country. Today we have been learning how to find the Arctic and the Antarctic, using globes, maps and atlases. What a fantastic start to the new academic year. Well done Robins!!

The wet and dismal weather did not manage to put Robins off having lots of fun during our Forest school lesson. Dressed for the weather in our waterproofs, we made dens with tarpaulins for shelter, we hunted for worms, slugs and snails and we had lots of fun using the rainwater to help us to create mud art. We made sculptures, we drew pictures, we let our imagination go wild, making pretend cups of tea, mudcakes and just generally having a great time splashing in the puddles. At the end of the session we had a special treat, we slid down a water slide whilst giving our feedback on the session. As you can imagine all the comments were favourable!

“I loved finding the worms”, “My favourite bit was playing in the puddles”, “It was brilliant making the dens and hiding in the woods”, were just a few of the comments from the children.

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The children in Robins have been developing their balancing skills and improving their core strength by taking part in a Rainforest Yoga session. We have been stretching our arms like toucans, our backs like anacondas, bending over like waterfalls and holding other poses including a Kapok tree pose, a howler monkey pose and a piranha pose amongst many others. The children were amazing, carefully trying to balance and move like animals from the Rainforest. See if you can recognise any of the animals from their poses.

Robins have had a fantastic term learning all about Italy. The geography, the history, the culture and the language of the country.

Here is a short video of some of the words and phrases that we have learnt!

Robins sono fantastici!

Earlier this week, Robins were very lucky to welcome ‘Julia’ to their classroom. ‘Julia’ came to talk to the class about her life as a Roman citizen. The children were very excited to hear all about her life, including where she lived, what she ate, what she wore and how she entertained her guests. The children helped ‘Julia’ to get ready for a party by making clay pots, writing a shopping list on wax tablets, making a class mosaic and dressing up in togas and laurel wreaths. It was an amazing afternoon and the children learnt so much about the Romans and in such a fun way! Thank you to Mrs Oldale for bringing our learning to life.

Robins have had lots of fun this week sampling Italian cuisine. Firstly, we cooked spaghetti in class and then tried to eat it by twirling it around on our forks. Some of us managed it …others didn’t! Take a look at the photos to see how successful we were. Afterwards, we made a mind map of all of the adjectives that we could think of to describe the spaghetti, then we created our own shape poems about the pasta. Come and look at the display in our classroom, the poems are superb.

Later in the week we had a gelato, another type of food that Italy is famous for. Again, we wrote some fantastic poems about ice-cream, using our senses to help us to expand our vocabulary to include some interesting adjectives.

Italian food has definitely inspired us to write some super pieces of poetry this week. Well done Robins!