This is Oak Class

This is Oak Class

Autumn Term 2009

This term our topic has been 'Food Around the World'. Alongside learning about the food from each country we have also been learning a little bit about the country itself. We started off at home by focussing on England and learned all about the Earl of Sandwich and how sandwiches have become very English. We also thought about what our favourite English dishes are and discovered that Sausage and Mash is quite popular in Oak Class!


After our week on England, we moved around the rest of the British Isles and tasted Welsh cakes and Bara Brith from Wales, and shortbread and tablet from Scotland. From the British Isles we travelled over to France and leaned how to count to ten and say hello in French. We also really enjoyed making garlic bread and croissants.
In Art we used food as our focus and made polyblock prints of different foods and also sketched different fruits and vegetables in black and white, colour and charcoal.


In PE we have been working on our multi skills and have had huge amounts of fun running over ladders, around cones and across hurdles. We have also been practising our throwing and catching and control skills as well as developing our team work.

At the end of the half term we had an Autumn Mix Up day with Holly and Maple classes. We worked with all the other children to make clay hedgehogs, handprint hedgehogs and autumn art using things that we had collected in the woods. What a fun way to end the half term!
We have had a very busy second part of the autumn term and the weeks have just whizzed by. We have been continuing with our topic of Food around the World, however alongside this we have also been learning about the Great Fire of London and thinking about Christmas.

	We started this half term with a Global Awareness fortnight. Our class was learning about Australia. We talked about some of the history of Australia, how it is similar or different to Britain and what links we have with Australia. We also spent a lot of time looking at some of the Aborigine art work and even had a go at trying to create some of our own art work in the style of the aborigines.

	Following on from Global Awareness fortnight we started to learn about the Great Fire of London. This was launched by a drama workshop with the company Perform, who helped take us back to the time of the great fire so that we could imagine what it must have been like when London was burning.

It also helped develop our understanding of the causes of the fire and how different people reacted. We were also amazed to learn that, although the fire burned down so much of the city, only four people died!

	On the 20th November it was the 20th birthday of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. To recognise this and to support Children in Need, the children came to school dressed up as something that they would like to be when they are older.

It was a fun day and there were lots of fantastic costumes. We thought about why children's rights are important and made birthday cards to celebrate the anniversary. We also looked at other countries where rights are not always respected and where children are not given the opportunity to grow up and achieve the jobs that they would like to do.

Our final country that we learned about was China. We were very lucky to have all our names written in Chinese for us, which we then tried to replicate. As part of our learning we interviewed Chestnut and Beech classes to help us find out about different aspects of China. We then used their knowledge of China to help us create presentations that we then showed to Maple Class.



We finished the term by thinking about Christmas. All of Key Stage 1 worked together to put on a production of 'Shine Star, Shine'. This was about a star that had forgotten how to shine so couldn't help people find their way to the stable. In our class we thought about the story of the nativity and the different characters that are in the story. We also thought about the different traditions we all have at Christmas time.


Spring Term 2010

We started our Spring term by focussing on Winter and the story Footprints in the Snow. This is a story about a wolf who finds some footprints and follows them to discover who made them. We were really lucky to have so much snow during the first few weeks of term as it allowed us to look at real footprints in the snow. This was then followed up by us writing our own stories about discovering some footprints in the snow.

	Our main topic of the term has been Kings, Queens and Castles. We started the topic off by looking at a 'Castles' box from Hampshire Wardrobe. There were costumes for a knight, a princess, a jester and some peasants. It was lots of fun dressing up in the costumes, although the knight's helmet was a little bit heavy!

Queen Elizabeth II has been a large part of our topic work and we have been learning all about her and how she became Queen. In art we painted portraits of the Queen and we even wrote letters to Queen Elizabeth to try to find out information about her - let's hope she writes back! Our Design Technology project was to make a new carriage that the Queen could use and we are sure she would love the many different models that we came up with.

	The highlight of our topic was a trip to Windsor Castle. We were very excited to see that Queen Elizabeth was home when we arrived, however the flag soon changed which meant that she had left the castle.

	On our visit we looked around St George's Chapel and the State Rooms, where we saw Queen Mary's dolls' house. We also watched the changing of the guard where we saw soldiers playing different instruments to each other.

	During our visit we took part in a workshop with a lady called Jo who told us about the history of Windsor Castle and how it has changed over the years. This session ended with Queen Eleanor knighting Sir Joshua.