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Summer 2026
Today we completed our final lesson of the year in geography. We took a lovely stroll around the village to make a village map using symbols. We had a great time thinking of symbols for the local buildings such as the church and the pub and even had a wonderful walk through the corn field and finished up at the park!
We have recently been looking at a story called :'Man on the moon'. The main character Bob travels to the moon on a daily basis and is surrounded by aliens! We made our own clay aliens and completed some writing showing Bob's rocket and looked into providing the aliens with a 'voice' by creating some speech for them.
We have planted beans in Chestnut class. We used cotton wool and compost and we have decided to put one in the sunlight, one outside and one in the dark to see what happens!
Choo Choo! We went on a train ride in big and little chestnut class today to explore our topic of journeys. We are looking at different types of journeys and this week have focused on train journeys. In class we have been lookng at different books about trains and playing with the train tracks where we have learnt all sorts of train related vocabulary. It was lovely to have a train adventure today and see the trains, station, conductor and drivers in real life!
In geography we began making maps of the school grounds. We used clear simple symbols as we learnt from our map work and closely observed what was around us. We also linked our learning from maths where we have been looking at directions and talked about what was on our left and right as we made the maps.
It was lovely to spend some time following some child led play this week. The group of children began using lots of different materials to make flowers with. As we worked together we looked at some artists that could extend these ideas. The children explored the graphic art of Orla Kierly and Bauhaus style pictures of flowers to then look at space and shape to create their own work. They then linked their learning further to think about primary colours and secondary colours in art.
In science we are looking at growing our own vegetables from scraps. We are popping the scraps in water to see how quickly they form roots and then can plant them out! We had some amazing predictions and also talked in depth about what makes a vegetable and what defines a fruit.
In geography we have been looking at symbols on maps. To reinforce our knowledge of some common symbols we used them to play an OAA game in our P.E. lesson. We were really confident with the symbols and next week we will use them in our own creations when we make maps of the school and village.
This week we have been exploring poetry through the wonderful book by Nick Sharrat called: 'Go go pirate boat'. We have focused on rhyming couplets and have made our own superb poems.
We competed in the virtual games with the Marches Trust. Schools in the trust compete at their own school in the different athletics events and then the lovely Georgia from the foundation 4 all goes away to collate the final scores as to where we came within the trust primary schools.
To finish our art project we have been mixing colours and making plates in the style of Clarice Cliff. We had a lovely time mixing and creating circular shapes to decorate just as she did.
We have been developing our fine motor skills by using screwdrivers. This was quite tricky! We had to learn how to turn the screwdriver the correct way and in quite small spaces with very tiny screws! It was great fun and we have found we really enjoy taking items apart!
In P.E. we have spent the last few weeks playing kick rounders. It has been great fun to practice the rules of rounders but by using a ball that we can kick instead of the tricky rounders bats. This week we decided to develop the game and use a tennis racket. This used out tennis skills we have learnt and put them into a game situation. It was great fun and we had quite a lot fielders having to run quite a way across the field!
In phonics we are working so hard to spell words with lots of different phonemes for the same graphemes. Today we looked at the 'se' ending in words.
In geography we have been learning all about the four nations of the UK. This week we looked at Northern Ireland. We explored the city of Belfast, talking about the titanic museum and other famous landmarks and then looked closely at the Giants Causeway. We learnt about the geographical reason for the causeway to be formed due to volcanic rock cracking to create the pattern of the causeway stones and we also looked at the myth about Finn McCool and Benadooner the Giant from Scotland and how their adventures created the causeway and even made the Isle of Man! when exploring this topic we used blocks to build the causeway, we explored printing via hexagons to create a rock face effect and we retold the story of Finn McCool in our writing.
Continuing with our colour mixing theme by using the media of paint we used Lego block printing to explore the ways in which we could make different colours. The children are so confident now with knowing how to make secondary colours that our discussions are not focused on the shade of green, orange and purple that we can make. We had some great descriptive language for the colours we created, from lime and sea green to violet to burgundy.
We investigated trees in our beautiful outdoor area. We are so blessed with such a lovely big space at Cockshutt and we are surrounded by a variety of species of trees. We investigated the different trees by identifying leaves and later on looked into the diffrerences between evergreen and deciduous trees.
We looked at the artist Jasper Johns and his work based around impasto painting where thick paint is used in this case to create secondary colours from primary colours. The children used numbers, just like in John's work to layer the paint and create the secondary colours.
It is lovely to see the children's creativity when they are in provision and this wonderful group of friends worked together like a perfect team making a wonderful zoo small world model. They carefully selected the coloured materials to use for specific water and land areas and discussed in great detail the animals they chose, the habitats they each should live in and the size differences between parents and offspring. It was wonderful to see so much talk and creativity in play.
In phonics we have been working so hard to look at alternative spellings. Focusing upon alternative graphemes and split digraphs. We have been reading, writing and sorting words with all of the different graphemes in.
Today we explored colour in art. We learnt all about the primary colours and how we use these to make secondary colours. We had a wonderful time experimenting!
This week we have began our new science topic all about plants. We started off identifying plants around the school grounds and discussing all of the different types of plants we could find. We also took the time to celebrate earth day on Wednesday by making seed bombs and planting a wildflower garden.
