Spring 2025


Alnwick Castle Class Beach School
Well the forecast may have looked a little dubious but we enjoyed the warmer temperature and the still day to have a lovely adventure for our beach day.

On the way we compared and contrasted our Winter season to our now Spring season and enjoyed identifying species and wildlife along our way, from Snowdrops to Gorse and Texel Sheep to Heron, Swans and Sandpipers.  We then spent a bit of time at the Woodland beginning our traditional tale adventures with a bit of drama, then three bears collecting and sorting into size.  After a little fruit break and story time with 'Mixed up Fairy Tales' we created our own dream dens / houses for the three little pigs.  We worked as a team to create some really imaginative features and took it in turns to present our creations to the class in our groups.

We were very ready for lunch and delighted to have as part of our lunch story time the whole school Space Adventure Story that we wrote as a collaboration on yesterday's World Book Day Celebrations with the rest of the school.  We then had lots of fun with the book 'Unfortunately', discovering the formula of how stories like to have a plot that is a problem and then a solution.

In the afternoon, now on the beach we recapped the features of traditional tales and then worked in our Crews to create our own Fairytale land.  Once again there were some fantastic creations.  The day was finished with a quick mark making challenge to design your own character and like a true artist...sign your name!

There maybe some tired legs but full creative minds - well done Alnwick Castle Class.
Patterns
It has has been a lovely week doing patterns.... everywhere! As well as preparing for our Space Assembly, parachute games, writing about the planets we would discover on a space adventure, Space Race fun, our well being hands for the whole school well being display and we introduced the Poetry Basket with Preschool. It was so impressive that as well as not only doing a fabulous performance for our assembly, by using the Poetry Basket we managed to learn a new space poem and perform it with preschool. This is going to be a wonderful way to develop our speaking and listening and develop all those core literacy skills like understanding rhyme, rhythm and word magic that performance poems can.
 

Well-Being Hands
We are all helping to make a whole school display about well-being as we have been learning about the 'The 5 Ways of Well-Being' which are...

- Be active
- Take notice
- Keep learning
- Give
- Connect

In early years especially, this is part of learning and developing that we support every day. Then to keep it simple and help us think about feeling good we have shared things that we can do that help us feel good and therefore, our minds healthy. Such a big concept but so important for ourselves.

For the display, we have each decorated a hand. The hand symbolises that there are 5 ways, that we are all important and unique and we can all give a helping hand.

We cannot wait to show you the whole school display when it is complete.

 

 

E Safety

Today we have had some time to think about the amazing and wonders of technology. First we had a think what technology is and then all the places we see it. We were amazed to know that even a washing machine and traffic lights are a form of technology.

We then talked about what technology we use and how we need to be safe with it - is it too good to be true! We used a story about 'Smartie the Penguin' to help us think about when it could be unsafe and how we could make good decisions. We did such a good job of helping and we used a song to help us remember...

Before you tap and click...
You need to STOP and THINK...
Then TELL SOMEONE!

We talked about making healthy choices of using technology then had a bit of experimenting time using our BEEBOT as a fun healthy educational form of technology.

 


 

Chinese New Year...the beginning of the celebrations

This week we have begun to think about Chinese New Year. It is a great way to think about culture and beliefs so we know that lots of people believe and celebrate different things and events. Therefore, it is important to be respectful of everyone's ideas.

We came together as Alnwick Castle Class and Preschool to listen to the story of the 'The Great Race' and discovered that each year is named after a different animal. Later, we joined in with some Chinese Zodiac yoga where we created poses of the different animals.

We have lots more activities that we are participating in throughout the week but today we had great fun making a paper chain. We worked as team, developing our fine motor skills and measure a chain 5 meters long - good effort EYFS!

 


 

Rocket Power!

Today as part of our Design and Technology skills we investigated how to strengthen paper. We tried different ways to make a 'bridge' of paper strong and discovered that folding, zig zagging or rolling paper can make it stronger.

We then used this idea to make our rockets. We used rectangles to roll into cylinders and circles to shape into cones. It was quite fiddly but it was a great way to work on our fine motor skills too.

In the end, we used all of these skills and each made a super rocket and finished by 'flying' them to 'Zoom Zoom Zoom'! Great design skills Alnwick Class.

 


Reading Buddies
It was so exciting today as now we are beginning to read short stories we have been teamed up with Reading Buddies in Year 5 to share our books with. They are there to support us, help us and have some fun as we share our books with them and they even read to us their favourite stories of the moment for us to listen to. This is a fun weekly way for us to practise our reading but also have some lovely reading modelled to us - thank you Year 5, lucky us