Welcome to Squirrel Class

The adults in Squirrel class are:

Miss Thompson

Squirrel Class Teacher

Mrs Williams  

Learning Support Assistant

Hello Squirrels! Hope you're all well! My name is Miss Thompson and I will be your class teacher in Year 1. I'm very excited to meet you all! We're super lucky to have Mrs Williams supporting the class too.

Squirrel Class News

24th April 

This week we have begun our "Gardeners' World" project. We have been curious scientists and explored our beautiful grounds, thinking about the growth of plants, identifying leaves and finding natural and un natural materials.  

17th April 

This week we have enjoyed learning related to the story "Our class is a family" by Shannon Olsen. We have thought about being ready, respectful and safe in school and collaborated to think about how our class family should be. 

We have also had a wonderful time challenging ourselves whilst doing a group drawing with our pens attached to strings! 

27th March 

Our Great fire of London pictures are brilliant! We carefully drew on boats and houses and the outcome is show stopping! We have had so much fun this week testing year two on their GfoL knowledge by hosting our very own quizzes! We are now looking forward to our clear the grounds day and showing how much  we care about our wonderful school! 

20th March

Our colour washes have turned out amazingly. This week we have practised silhouette shapes of boats and houses to add the exciting detail to our paintings. We had lots of time with our art journals to perfect the shapes and we can add these to our paintings on Thursday

13th March

We have started a fabulous painting depicting the Great Fire of London. We have been inspired by the work of Jan Griffier who lived between 1652 and 1718. We have learnt to mix different firey shades and also learnt how to make a wash to depict the River Thames. We will be adding more details next week when our paint is dry!

6th March

We had another fantastic Reading Together session today - thank you so much to everyone who had time to pop by.

We are very busy in English, learning all the skills we will need to write a letter to Mrs Wilson about the Great Fire of London. We know so many facts now, it's quite amazing! We have shared and celebrated all the amazing home learning that has come in - no wonder we know so much!

28th February

After last weeks endless rain, we were finally able to sit around the fire pit today and experience first hand the sights and smells of a real fire. It was a wonderful, calm experience which allowed us to develop our vocabulary and will help our writing!

We were also so happy to welcome parents into our classroom for our first ever 'Reading Together' session. We will do this again every Tuesday from 8.40 - 8.55 and look forward to welcoming you again!

20th February

We hope you enjoyed your half-term break! We've launched straight into our Fire! Fire! project with an exciting discovery in the woods - a chest containing a curly wig, a stinky parmesan cheese, a bottle of wine from 1666 and a diary written in code! We think it might have been buried by Samuel Pepys nearly 400 years ago.

To learn more about the Great Fire of London we have started doing some amazing guided drama using an audio track.

If you would like to hear it for yourselves, or perhaps relive the excitement and terror of the Fire at home, visit: 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/history-great-fire-of-london-welcome-to-the-matrix/zfdq8xs

7th February

This week we have been thinking really hard about counting in 2's and then using our skills to solve word problems. It's not too hard to remember the 2's numbers as a chant, but it gets trickier when we have to find the pattern and then really challenging when we are using them to work out problems!

31st January 

This week we have all spent time with our teachers to do ou very best reading and maths - it is so lovely to get some one to one time together!

We have finished our Betsy's Gand Adventure project - we are all amazing authors and have written her a new adventure in the Sahara Desert.

To get a head start on our Fire, Fire! project we had an amazing workshop from the OpenBox Theatre Company all about the Great Fire of London. We loved every second of it!

24th January

This week we have learned about the equator, and where Greenland and the Sahara Desert are located on our planet. Our story writing is coming on really well - we are looking forward to performing our stories to year 2 soon to finally solve the mystery of where Betsy is for them!

We have also thought about the RSPB and the Garden Birdwatch. If you want to get involved please go to

www.rspb.org.uk/whats-happening/big-garden-birdwatch/register

17th January

We love learning about the geography of our planet. We have found out that there are 7 continents and 5 oceans. We have 2 favourite songs to help us remember their names.

You can find them on YouTube, but remember that an adult needs to check links before children watch them!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6DSMZ8b3LE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6BE4VcYngQ

We have started to learn about the Sahara Desert to help our story writing about this dry and sandy place.

10th January

Wow - Betsy Butterfly has gone on a Grand Adventure and is currently in Greenland! We are going to find out some facts about the earth and its continents to help us investigate her next destination of the Sahara Desert!

3rd January

Welcome Back!

It' s great to all be together again. We have started this term by learning about Special Places. We have already thought about places that are very special to us, and what 'special' actually means. Later on this week we will think about Gurdwaras and how they are special places for Sikhs.

Next week we will launch another new project....watch this space!

13th December

We are having a thoughtful, spiritual time this week. We went to St Peter's Church on Monday and shared our wonderful singing with you. We hope you enjoyed it as we worked ever so hard on learning all those words! Now we are learning about Journey's End and why journeys of all sorts are important to people. We will apply this learning to a journey taken in The Bible and why this is important to Christians. We will round the week off with a Christmas party in class to celebrate, and a 'Clear the Grounds' session on Friday to show our appreciation of the beautiful school we are in.

We finish at 1.15 on Friday, and then we can't wait to see you again on Tuesday 2nd January!

Look who came to see us on Friday!

6th December

We are very busy practising for our Christmas singing service which is next Monday at 2pm at St Peters Church. We are looking forward to seeing our families there too!

Talking of Christmas, we had a wonderful Christmas craft day on Friday. We have made some lovely paper chains and snowflakes to decorate our classrooms.

30th November

We have loved seeing all the parents and carers at Parents Evenings this week. It's been such a great opportunity to share your children's progress and to hear your thoughts on how everyone is getting on.

In class, we are writing our innovated stories derived from Jack and the Beanstalk. Everyone has invented their own new character and is showing some fantastic concentration to be the best writer they can be!

We can't wait for Friday, as we are having a Christmas craft day. We will be making decorations for our own classroom!

22nd November

We are continuing to learn more about writing this week by spotting all the nouns in our story of Jack and the Beanstalk. We are really enjoying maths at the moment as well by sharing and grouping amounts fairly, learning about odd and even numbers and by counting in 2's.

We also are grateful to Mr Byrom and Bike It John who have helped us learn how to be safe when we're out and about in the dark, and ran our 'Bling My Ride' competition!

15th November

We have made a great start on our puppet show by learning the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, which we can confidently recite with all the actions! We have learnt what an adjective is and started collecting adjectives about Jack and the Giant.

We are also researching and designing puppet show stages. We absolutely love DT!

8th November

We found an extraordinary disaster in the woodland on Monday, there was a broken beanstalk, a smashed golden egg and a letter!

The letter is from Jack and he has set us a very interesting challenge. We will learn, write and perform his story as a puppet show to Year R using stages and puppets we have made ourselves. We can't wait!

We have also had a brilliant skipping workshop session and show this week. We have found out that we love skipping and want to work on our skills.

1st November

We hope you had a wonderful half term! Everyone has come back very cheerful and ready to learn. Next week we will be starting our next project - I wonder what exciting things will be happening? We will send home the new project leaflet this week.

17th October

We are looking forward to celebrating our Eastleigh Explorers learning on Wednesday afternoon. We are especially excited about showing off our books to you at our living map event!

We are now thinking about Thanking as part of our RE learning. We can't wait to go to the Harvest Festival celebration at the Church on Thursday!

11th October

We enjoyed poetry day last week very much! We spent the day listening to and writing poems. Our teachers swapped classes for a short while, so we loved listening to other peoples favourite poems too!

If you would like to know more please have a look on:

https://nationalpoetryday.co.uk/

27th September

We have looked very closely at maps of the UK and closer to home. We have found where Eastleigh is in England. We have also decided that one of the lovely things about Eastleigh is Matts Bakery, so we have made our own biscuits so that we can write instructions. What a great way to spend the afternoon!

20th September

Our portraits are fantastic! We learnt how to mix the paint carefully and then painted our drawings. It was so great to share our wonderful artworks with you.

Now we have launched our new project of 'Eastleigh Explorers', because we found out that some people think Eastleigh is boring! Outrageous! We went for a wonderful (but windy!) walk to Boyatt Wood to start our learning.

13th September

We have become artists to start creating self portraits. We have been inspired by the work of Vincent Van Gogh. We have used art pencils to draw our images. We will be learning about colour mixing skin tones and painting them later this week. We can't wait for you to see the finished articles!

6th September 2023

What a great start we have made! We are all very busy making new friends and catching up with old ones as Squirrel Class. Lots of things are the same as they were in Year R, but some things have changed. We are really enjoying getting stuck into our 'All About Me' project. We have already been scientists and learnt more about the human body.

Summer 2023

We hope you are having a wonderful summer break! We can't wait to see you in September. We would love to learn all about you and your family when we start in September. Here is your home learning challenge!

Class Email

If you need to speak to me (Miss Thompson) please feel free to email me at:

squirrel@shakespeare-inf.hants.sch.uk