Cedar's Christmas Spirit

Pupils in Cedar have come in with a buzz of excitement in their Christmas jumpers today!

Kimberley and Finley continued in the festive mood by finding the most new words from the words:

FATHER CHRISTMAS and CHRISTMAS TREE

Well done to our little Winter Word Wizards!

Year 1 maths challenge.

A group of year 1 children were given the answer to a question and they had to use addition and subtraction to find the answer. They worked very well as a team to solve the problem.

Cedar Star writer.

Jameel has only been at Broadford for 2 weeks but already he has shown what it takes to be a fantastic writer. He wrote a diary extract as Samuel Pepys in the past tense. Well done Jameel.

Mulberry's Class Tree

To continue the learning Year One have been doing about the four seasons, we decided to choose a class tree and watch it throughout the rest of the year to observe the changes that happen as the seasons change.

We went for a walk around the school grounds, and considered ourselves very lucky to have so many beautiful trees to choose from.

We noticed that even though it's Winter, some of the trees are still green and others have lost their leaves. James Wise noticed however that there were some brown leaves on an evergreen tree, and a group discussion afterwards led to a very interesting conversation about how plants are alive like we are alive.

We chose our favourite tree, collected some leaves and made some observations. We are looking forward to watching what changes happen to our tree in the Spring!

Year 2 visit Age Concern.

Some of the Year 2 children went to Age Concern in Hornchurch this week to play board games with the day care members. They played connect four, snakes and ladders, cards and frustration extremely well.
Godswill even asked, "Can we come back next Thursday?"


Their outstanding behaviour and manners were commented on by several members of the public.

Time to test our predictions in Cherry class!

This afternoon our science lesson was to test our predictions for which materials would float or sink and which had most buoyancy. We have been looking at a variety of materials and discussing their properties. We also discussed how we could  make the test fair and it was agreed that the amount of water used and how we placed each item into the water had to be the same. It was then time to carry out our test!

Cedar star writer is.....

Aimee Borrell! Congratulations Aimee on a fantastic piece of diary writing.

The Smartie Challenge in Cedar!

Pupils in Cedar Class have been engaging with their data handling learning with big grins this week. The class were asked to record the frequency of colours within a party size box of smarties. So what was it that created the wide smiles:

Could it be their grasp of organising raw data into tally charts? 

Could it be their pride as they transfer this into pictograms? 

Or...could it be the delight of eating the smarties after the data is collected?

Whichever way we have had great fun in Maths!

Festive snowflakes

Children in Pine class began to get into the festive spirit this afternoon as they made paper snowflakes during their independent learning time. This really tested their motor skills as they had to carefully cut out patterns in the paper - which can be more difficult than it sounds, particularly as when folded up the paper is quite thick. They then unfolded the paper to reveal their designs. Some of them were so engaged with the activity that they made multiple snowflakes to take home and put up as decorations!

Materials

During the Autumn term, the children in year one have been busy learning about different materials. They have distinguished between an object and the material from which it is made. They have had to identify and name a variety of everyday materials, including wood, plastic, glass, metal, water and rock.

Throughout the term they have enjoyed several activities investigating and describing the simple properties of materials using a range of forced alternatives e.g.  stretchy/stiff, shiny/dull, rough/smooth, opaque/transparent. 

To conclude this topic we have set up an enhancement in the classroom to encourage the children to sort the objects that are hidden and to place them in the labelled boxes.

Winter artwork

No wonder Evie looks so pleased with herself. Look at the fantastic picture she has created using the art programme on the computer. She started by using the fill icon to create a dark background and then used various tools to create the winter scene. Good job, Evie!

Seasonal Changes

In year one, we have been observing seasonal changes and the weather associated with different seasons. Wrapped up in our coats, wearing our hats and gloves we went for a walk around the school to observe how the season has been changing from Autumn into Winter. During our walk we collected lots of leaves and twigs to creature structures and artwork on our return.

Chloe led a group of children with the great idea of making the alphabet out of twigs. Another group decided to decorated the reading den with an arrangement of leaves.

I wonder what differences we will notice over the coming weeks!

Cedars Smarties pictograms

Cedar have been using smarties ( not to eat ) but to make graphs and pictograms. First they had to make a tally chart showing how many of each colour smarties they had. Then they put them onto a graph. We labelled the vertical axis number of smarties and the horizontal axis colours. Next we recorded how many of each colour smarties they had. Finally we could eat them. Yum!