our first commission

we were contacted by the supermarket Lidl. They were disappointed by some photographs that another company had taken. They asked us if we would retake the pictures for them. We used our knowledge of how to take a good picture and organised the products to look their best. Lidl were happy with our pictures and are going to use them in next weeks magazine.

Fantastic Flash Photographers

we are a team of expert photographers, we take photos of all sorts of things from weddings to animals! We use the finest equipment and have travelled the world taking  photos.

Lifeboat number 10

The Youngest passenger on board the Titanic was only 9 weeks old. She was rescued alongside her mother and her brother. She was in lifeboat number 10.

We imagined how the people in that lifeboat would have felt during the rescue.

Titanic's lifeboats

There were only 20 lifeboats on board the ship. This wasn't enough for all the passengers. Each lifeboat held roughly 60 people.

Using tinfoil we experimented making our own lifeboats, we used 60 cubes to represent each passenger. It was very exciting to see whose boat would stay afloat and whose might sink. We watched what happened and then modified our designs to improve the 'safety' of our life boats.

Spring 2 

2024

Mantle - The World’s Best Gardeners

Placed in the classroom, were 4 sad looking planters. They looked as though they’d been forgotten. We thought they needed brightening up with some flowers. In Year 1 we learnt a lot about flowers. We could talk about stems, leaves, petals, flower heads, pollen, seeds and roots. This will help us so much with our new learning in Year 2.

What are all these bits of paper? What does it all mean? We got to work piecing together all of the parts and discovered that the community centre was hosting a meeting for gardeners… We we’re keen to find out some more, so we went along to find out…

The meeting was very interesting. We discovered that The Royal Horticultural Society were supporting the Sandhurst community by improving their gardens in communal spaces. The trouble was, most of the help came from volunteers. They needed some expert gardeners to help lead the project. 
 

Leigh, the project leader explained that two areas were high on the list of priorities. The two places were the mosque and the church. He showed us pictures of the church grounds, which was tidy, but sadly the flowers planted previously hadn’t returned after the winter. At the mosque, we discovered that a new area of land had been given to the mosque, but it needed some work to get it ready for planting. 
 

The team were pretty excited, so we agreed to find out a bit more about Sandhurst.

Using our new skills in maths, we explored Sandhurst using the language of position. Words such as left, right, up, down and in between, helped us to create a map of Sandhurst.  

Next, we met with the vicar. He works in the church. He showed us around and told us some really interesting information about some of the objects and signs we saw inside the church and he explained what it meant to be Christian. After that, he talked about what he hoped would happen to the garden area.

The vicar gave us a plan. The plan had three areas on it. He was very clear, plants that usually grow back each year, planted around the edge of the grass area and no plants planted in the middle. 

We asked if we could take the plans back to our office, where we could look into what was best to plant. Some of us knew about lilies, sunflowers and daffodils , so we wanted to check if any of these would be suitable.

When we got back to the office, we started researching flowers and plants. We discovered some pages that had months of the year on them, with flower pictures and information. One of the team said, there’s one for ever month! Another member said, in the middle of February, my mum started planting seeds in the greenhouse! Did this mean some plants need to be planted at certain times of year?

We discovered that not only do seeds and bulbs need planting at different times throughout the year, but that we were entering a new season. 

We wanted to know if seeds were always small? Look at some of the seeds we found in food!

We were thinking about the church, and what we needed to choose to plant in the areas. We headed to the greenhouse to look. We had some plants growing well, we could see they were bulb plants and we suspected that they were daffodils or tulips, but we needed to take a closer look…

It was fascinating to look at these plants. We were able to talk about flower heads, buds, roots, stem, leaves, growth, bulb and notice similarities and differences between the two different plants. We made some observational drawings and added some labels to help us identify the plants. 

We were able to identify that the two plants were daffodils and hyacinths. We wanted to see the flowers, but we knew they needed water, warmth and time to grow. We took some measurements of the plants and recorded them. We will do this every week for 4 weeks to observer the change over time!  

From the information we discovered earlier, we could see that daffodil bulbs usually return after each year, and they are pretty easy to care for. Poppies are also quite clever, they spread their seeds and often return each year. This was useful for  making some plans of what we might plant at the church. We used even more maths skills and explored new vocabulary and language to help us draw where the plants could be planted.

A few considerations needed to be made. The church had a deciduous tree, which could not be cut down. It created shade on the grass and was home to birds, so cutting it down was not an option. We used secondary sources to discover which bulbs, seeds and plants could survive in the shade. Snowdrops grown well in shady spots and often can be found near to trees. We decided that these would be perfect for area 3. Area 2 had both sunlight and shade, so needed to be something that can grow in either condition. Our secondary sources informed us that daffodils can grown in both, therefore they’d be great. The finally, unlike the bulb plants, poppies are seeds and although they don’t return from their original seed, they spread their seeds from the flower. We did have to consider their appeal to the birds, so we added a bird house with poppy seeds in to deter the birds.

The mosque had been given some land, but unfortunately it needed some work to tidy it up. We represented the area and noticed that the diggers had stopped working. They had made a discovery. A box had been run over and the contents had been covered with rubble. The parts we could see looked important….

Using a map, we plotted where we found the objects. Using drama, we discussed with a member of the community what each item was and what it was for. Amongst the objects, we discovered a note, written in Arabic. Some of us thought it might be Chinese, but the member of the community helping us recognised the handwriting. She said it was Arabic and looked like it had been written by a child. The note said, “My precious box. Here I keep all the things I use for worship”. Each item was used for worship within Islam. It seemed to have been buried, like treasure! 
 

Rehana, the lady helping us suggested we spoke to the Imam. He is the prayer leader of the mosque and would be able to help some more. The Imam told us about the family that used to live in the space and how the daughter most probably left the box before leaving. He was able to contact the family and get it back to them. 
 

Our next task was to deal with the ground. The Imam hoped the area would be clean and open. Somewhere where they could host charity events and welcome the community to meet there. 
 

In our Computing learning, we developed our understanding of direction and movement, and applied this to robots. We used BeeBots to explore this further. We imagined that the BeeBots were tarmacking vehicles and that we were covering the problems on the ground.

To ensure that the algorithms were accurate, we planned them out and checked them to see if they would start and end where we had planned. After this, we debugged the algorithms that needed fixing and then inputted then algorithms into the BeeBots and watched them as they travelled around the site.

To help us discover more about Islam and what it’s like to be Muslim, our friends from Year 3 came to tell us more. We asked appropriate questions, listened carefully and made links between what we know about Islam and Christianity. 

Throughout our Mantle, we’ve been working really hard on caring for seeds, bulbs and plants. We wanted to explore how a plant changed over time. We carefully observed and measured our plants over 4 weeks to se what happened. We were able to see them grow in length, grow stems, buds and flower heads and also, begin to die. 
 

We also wanted to see what happened to seeds as they begin to germinate. This was very interesting, but we also realised that seeds germinate and grow at very different rates. Whilst some seeds began to shoot and sprout quickly, others took days or even weeks! Throughout the process we kept a notebook with a small drawing of what we saw each day. On Day 23 we planted them into the Quad and hope to see them grow into mature plants and maybe, pick some beans off the plant! 
 

We also looked at a range of different seeds and bulbs to see if we could work out what plant they had originally come from. 

Spring 1

2024

Mantle - The Holiday Helpers

This half term we are working as a team of travel agents called The Holiday Helpers. We are experts in booking, organising and planning holidays for our customers. 
 

We will be learning about ways people keep and save money, we will learn about how money can be spent and discuss the difference between want and need. We will also be learning about statistics in Maths, collecting and recording data and presenting it in different ways. We will be finding out how to present this data both on paper and with technology. 
 

To begin, we started by working in small teams organising the new brochures for this year. We have a winter brochure and a summer brochure. We hope the customers will be very impressed with the different activities we can offer both on a summer holiday and a winter holiday.  

Meeting our client

We were delighted to meet our new client, Heather. She is a 65 year old lady, who has been saving for many years. She is going to retire from work and wants to plan a surprise holiday for her daughter and her grandchildren. 
 

Heather had a red bag, brown boots and grey hair when we saw her in the travel agents. We made sure when we represented her, we included this. It takes a lot of team work to get all the details as we want them.

Heather said she would pop back in on Saturday morning to see us. She was less nervous and said she wanted a summer holiday. She definitely didn’t want a winter holiday because it was too cold. One of our team suggested the boat trips, but Nicola, her daughter wasn’t a fan of boats. Another team member discussed the kite flying activity at the beach and Heather really liked this idea. Heather was reminded of Nicola flying a kite when she was 11. 
 

Heather had to go because the bus was coming soon, but before she left she took some information and one of the team said you can Google some of the ideas online. 
 

This gave us a great opportunity to discuss our website. Using the internet is a great way to find information when you know the right places to look. We thought we might need to have a look at our website before we show it to Heather.

Once we had created the website, we showed it to Heather. Heather would me more comfortable coming into store, rather than using the internet. We said it’s fine, we can help her in store. 

Following on from showing Heather our website, we began collecting ideas for our family holiday brochures. The team agreed that summer holidays often included a pool, beach, golf, caravan/camper van and theme parks and fairs. The question was, which would be most popular? 
 

Using our newly learnt skills in maths, we created a table together and agreed to ask a number of adults in school which they’d choose. We then used a tally to collect each vote. We then totalled the votes and used them to create a pictogram and block diagram. 
 

In our computing learning, we discovered we could digitally create pictograms and print them off. Take a look at all of the work in action!

The most popular family holiday was a beach holiday. Although, the team felt that we should offer Heather a hotel that had a wide range of options, including a beach. 
 

The team discussed with Heather our findings, and Heather was very excited. She had some reservations though. Would a holiday like this potentially use up all of her savings? She asked if we could create three levels of holiday, one that didn’t include flight costs, a short flight holiday and a luxury holiday. The team felt they had lots of expert knowledge in this.

Some of us knew that Cornwall was a really, really long drive, so we talked about Weston, but lots of the team knew about Butlins. They felt this was a very fun holiday, not too far away and lots for families. 
 

Quite a few of our team knew about Spain. Some had been, they knew about the beaches, water parks and theme parks. This seemed a great option. 
 

Finally, we discussed luxury. Some of the team wanted to call it VIP, so we planned a VIP holiday. Once we saw the photos, we wondered if it was child friendly, but we still collected the information for Heather. 
 

We had a look at some data about ways people choose to pay. We then used the data to make a block diagram/chart on the iPad. This was a bit different to the pictogram because we inputted our data into a table first, then it created a block diagram for us. 

Design Technology

Within our Mantle story, Heather has commissioned us to create a money pouch for her grandchildren to carry their holiday spending money. We have learnt to thread a needle, tie a knot and use a running stitch. 

First we designed our pouch on paper. Then we used this design for our template and pinned it to the felt. We carefully cut around the template then removed the paper ready to pin back together before stitching. Once the two pieces of felt were on top of each other, we could begin stitching. 

Art - Expressive Painting 

To help us with our new learning in Art, we have been exploring the idea of collecting visual notes. These are drawings, illustrations and colour marks that help us to represent what we have noticed about the artists we are exploring. 
 

Have a look at these fabulous examples of visual notes we have created…

Expressive Painting

To help with developing our expressive painting, we’re learning about the primary colours. We know these colours can be mixed to create secondary colours.

After learning about artists famous for expressive painting and learning colour mixing skills, we began using these new skills within our Mantle. 
 

Heather is on holiday in Spain. The Holiday Helpers helped her to organise and book it. We used our mixing and expressive painting learning to create postcards inspired by the sea and beach. 
 

One of our friends said, we’re just like Charlie, using these tools! Have a look…. We used toothbrushes, feathers, peg dolls and kebab sticks as well as some less unusual art tools! We explored texture by adding sand to our paint and observed the way acrylic paint dries thicker than poster paint.

Look out for the finished display soon!

PE - The Circus

In PE, we’ve been learning about dance. We’ve been learning about sequences and beats of 8. One of the tasks we needed to do was to look at some performers in a circus, and create a sequence together.
 

Look out for our entrance march, pointing at the acrobats, silly clowns, jugglers and strength show. 

Autumn 2023

The year is 1666, the place is Pudding Lane. What is happening?

The fire spread quickly because the houses were made of wood and built so closely together. King Charles saw the fire from his window, he was very worried about what he was seeing.

Art - Explore and Draw

We have been finding out about the artist Andy Goldsworthy and his interest in natural resources. Andy Goldsworthy collects resources and inspiration from the outdoor spaces he visits and explores. He then uses these to create unique pieces of art. Have a look at this video that we looked at in class…

We noticed that all the artists we observed collected resources based on their interests. Within our Mantle with Mrs Ryall we were a team of conservationists, so we were particularly interested in nature and the natural world. We decided we’d collect natural resources, like Andy Goldsworthy. Woodrow First School is full of oak trees, so we were able to find lots of acorns, oak leaves, bark, twigs and stones. 

After collecting all of our resources, we set to work creating non-permanent art and using our collection of materials to make patterns with nature. 

After we all created our patterns, Miss Sleem collected all of the photos and created a collective collage to display the art work altogether.

Building our skills

In Year 1, we learnt the skill of continuous line drawing. In Year 2, we build upon that skill, using it to add intricate details and make closer observations of our object we’re drawing. We used both pencil and fine line pens to create our art.

Our final skill in this part of our learning was to explore and experiment with wax resist painting. Within Mrs Ryall’s mantle, the team were finding out about Eyam and had observed lots of heather growing in Eyam Moor. We examined the heather, making very close observations and magnifying so that we could see the very fine details.

We then used wax crayons to outline the heather and revisited our watercolour skill to paint the heather in purples and pinks. When we painted over the wax, we discovered  that the paint didn’t stick to the wax.

Maths - Geometry 2D shape (to be continued)

We have been building on our shape knowledge, learning new shape names and building our mathematical vocabulary.

We have been challenging ourselves to recognise 2D shapes, count the number of sides, count the number of vertices, accurately draw shapes using a ruler and look for vertical lines of symmetry. 
 

We used various resources to create representations of 2D shapes.

Drawing accurate 2D shapes is REALLY challenging, so if you can try and use a ruler/straight edge at home with a pencil to try drawing shapes, that will help you a lot!
 

Mantle with Miss Sleem 

This half term, we will be learning about lots of science! We are finding out about animals and their young, including humans. 
 

To begin, we heard of a road in Australia, lined with bushes and trees. Along the road there had been an accident, and sadly a kangaroo had been hurt. As a team of Wildlife Rescuers, we were called to help. 
 

When we arrived at the site, we could confirm that the kangaroo had died, but one of our team members noticed a clue that might suggest that the kangaroo was a female…

“It must be a female, because it has a pouch. The female ones have a pouch to carry the baby” 

We agreed, it did have a pouch and we agreed it must be female. This lead another team member to explain that kangaroo babies actually have a name…

“Kangaroo babies are called a joey”

The scene became tense, what if this kangaroo had a joey in the pouch? 

The team discovered there was a joey, a tiny furless joey known as a pinky. 
 

Time was ticking, we needed to safely remove the pinky but one team member said “babies are delicate and we must be very gentle”. We also discovered that touching them with our germs could be dangerous for them, so we agreed to remove it using a clean, dry blanket. 
 

To help us with our story, we each made a representation of the pinky using playdough. We all loved it and thought they looked so sweet and tiny. 

Once we had our furless joey, we stepped back in and began rescuing it from the pouch. Right now, temperature was the main danger, the pinky could not get too cold.

The joey is now safely out, but the next few weeks will be critical. What other needs will this living creature have? What else will we need to do as experts to keep this tiny living creature alive? 

The furless joey (pinky) was placed in our Critical Care Unit and we briefed the team with the care it would require. 
 

The joey needs:

• warmth 
• water
• food
• clean, fresh air to breathe

The incubator has air holes to allow fresh air in. The team have created a rota for everyone to take it in turns to be responsible for feeding the joey. Each feed has to be measured and we can only give two drops per feed. 
 

Our focus here is to keep the joey hydrated and avoid dehydration. To ensure each feed is delivered accurately, we are collecting evidence on our feeding chart. We then will be able to calculate the number of feeds the joey has per week. 
 

The importance of good hygiene 

As a responsible team, we must take measures to maintain good hygiene. We have been monitoring our hygiene habits, washing our hands, wearing protects clothing and ensuring that the water is clean and fresh. 
 

The team have been carefully monitoring the furless joey, giving it regular feeds and recording each feed to help them gather information. They have been working scientifically by observing over time the amount of feeds it needs over one week. 
 

They then were able to use that information to create a block graph to show their findings.

After some time, the team noticed that the furless joey had started to change. It started to grow fur and its body grew bigger. This made us wonder, are we feeding the joey enough now it’s grown? One of our team members knew that kangaroos were herbivores and that they definitely didn’t eat meat, but we all wondered if it was ready for solid food yet. We discovered that joeys aged up to 2 years need to be kept in the mothers pouch and would still feed milk. So, our joey still needed milk. We did some reading…

At this age, the joey needs roughly 4 large bottle feeds per day because it’s not feeding from its mother. When it grows, it will begin to eat grass, leaves and flowering plants, and once fully grown it will no longer need milk. 
 

We created bottles to feed the joey it’s new measure of milk.

We learnt the term offspring. This means the young of an animal, human or plant. To expand our knowledge we explored ‘what offspring belongs to which animal?’ We matched the offspring to the animal. 

So, now we have successfully helped the joey to grow by providing the basic needs for survival, it’s clear it is doing well. It was time to take them out of the incubator and place them into a warm pen. We used a thick, warm fabric to create a pouch-like space. We will soon need to explore who will continue to care for the joey now our work is complete. 
 

Perhaps we will be faced with a new animal to care for…

We were extremely excited, but also sad to see Australia Zoo had contacted us to say that they were ready to take our joey to their kangaroo enclosure. We were concerned about how well the kangaroo would be cared for, so asked to see more about where it would be placed. We watched a video of Chandler and Bindi the keepers, feeding the mob of kangaroos and we could tell, our joey would be far happier with other animals. 
 

We prepared the cage for transportation…

New animal to care for!
 

Following a recent flood, some members of the local community collected up buckets and buckets of stranded frog spawn! They brought it to us to care for, but are we fully prepared?

To help us represent the frog spawn, we used chia seeds. We observed how it changed over time when we add water and leave it over night.  

Preparing the tank for the spawn

To help us to understand the environment the frog spawn would need to survive, we watched a video that gave us all the information we needed. We the created a step by step plan, that we can keep in our department to help future team members understand how to care for frog spawn. 
 

We successfully created a suitable environment to allow the frog spawn to develop into a tadpole. After this, the tadpoles developed into froglets that eventually became frogs and could be released back into the wild.

We have really enjoyed working in the critical care team caring for animals, 

Autumn 2 Maths - Money

This half term we are learning about money, including coins and notes.

We have been looking at the words value and worth. 

To help us understand the value of each coin, we have been using base 10 to support our leaning. This helps us when we are trying to find the total of a given number of coins. For example, 20p can be repressed as two 10s - see below for examples of base 10 alongside coins to support calculating the total. 

We have been using our place value knowledge to help us calculate totals that include tens and ones. Have a look at how this looks in the classroom…

In the pictures above, we have chosen either base 10 tens or ones to show the value of each coin, then counted them by counting the tens first, then the ones to find the total. 
 

We also use drawing the tens and ones as a method of finding the total, see below for a representation of a pictorial drawing of base 10.

Here we have used a line to represent each ten and a dot to represent each one. We are familiar in counting in groups or multiples of 2, 5 and 10, so we can count in tens first, then count on to find the total.

Can you find the total below? It would be great to see the children exploring money at home, using coins to buy items within your home!