Ferrari Class – Autumn Term 2, 2023

Week 13 and 14

Christmas has arrived in Ferrari! The children were so excited to see the BFS elves has visited Ferrari classroom leaving a beautifully decorated Christmas Tree and an Advent Calendar. Every morning the children have enjoyed telling stories of what their cheeky ‘home’ elves have been getting up to, I am just glad our elves are well behaved!

Here are the highlights of our last two weeks of learning.

Ferrari and Alfa Romeo have teamed up to put on a fantastic Nativity play called ‘The Gigantic Star’. All the children have risen to the challenge; learning all the songs and actions as well as their lines for the play. On Thursday 14^th December, the children did their first performance to Key Stage 2 and to the visiting Italian School. It was their first time performing on a stage and to an audience. They did a fantastic job! The children are now set and ready for their performance to their parents on Monday. Well done Ferrari and Alfa Romeo, we are so proud of you!

Ferrari Class are authors! Our English unit for this half of term has been The Three Little Pigs by Mara Alperin and Ag Jakkowska. The aim of this unit is to write the story changing some key details such as the characters and/or setting. The children have retold the story, created story maps, written character and setting descriptions as well as learning how to write in the past tense and to understand what an onomatopoeia is! Using all this knowledge and applying these skills, the children have successfully written they own wonderful ‘traditional’ stories. The children have enjoyed sharing their stories with each other and are excited to read these stories to their friends in Alfa Romeo!

As we march towards the Christmas break, we are coming to the end of many of our units of study. This week the children have completed their geography companion project ‘Our Wonderful World’. This essential skills and knowledge project has taught the children about physical and human features, maps, cardinal compass points, and positional and directional language. They have learnt about the equator, hemispheres and continents and have been introduced to the countries, capital cities and settlements of the United Kingdom. The children have really enjoyed this topic and it is clear we have some budding geographers in our midst’s!

This week has also seen the culmination of our art topic ‘Funny Faces and fabulous features’ where the children have learnt about the concept of portraits and how the collage technique can be used to make a portrait. This topic has caused a lot of laughter as the children have enjoyed looking at and creating portraits using the collage technique. They have had the opportunity to recreate famous portraits and discuss why they have selected them as their favourite. This week they created a self portrait with Mrs Pollington as part of their express activity.

The children have still been working hard on their mathematical skills. The Year 1 children have been focusing on ‘one more and one less’ up to 50 and the Year 2 children have been revising fact families. All children revisited the use of greater than, less than and equal to symbols. The Year 2 children have now completed the White Rose Shape unit where they have looked at the properties of 2D and 3D shapes as well as basic symmetry. The Year 1 children are now consolidating their understanding on number by focusing on place value up to 50.

We continue to be very proud of the enthusiasm and joy in learning shown by Ferrari Class.

Week 11 and 12

Ferrari have settled into two weeks of great learning. The children are thinking about our learning behaviours and how they support us in our daily activities in class. I am so impressed with the way the children are thinking about the connections in their learning and applying it to the activity they are undertaking.

Here are some of the highlights from the last two weeks.

In maths, the Year 2 children have successfully completed their Addition and Subtracting unit of learning showing great results in their assessments. Well done Year 2! They have now moved on to the Shape unit which starts with a recap on their Year 1 learning. Here they identified 2D and 3D shapes before investigating the properties of 2D shapes. The have focused on sides, vertices and lines of symmetry so far. What a super start! In the maths area the children have enjoyed making towers out of 3D and magnetic shapes for our fairy tale characters.

The Year 1 children have successfully finished their Shape unit, completing a variety of investigations including making 2D shapes out of lolly sticks, towers out of 3D shapes and making repeating patterns with 2D shapes.

They have now moved onto a Money Unit which will be covered again in the Summer Term. They have done an excellent job of identifying the coins and learning to make amounts. Did you know that there are no 3p or 4p coins? They discovered that there was more than one way to make an amount with coins.

We have really enjoyed the story of The Three Little Pigs. The children have listening to a variety of versions of the story and can retell the story using puppets and are able to create a story S/map. In the classroom we have dedicated an area where the children can role play, write their own stories and read the books independently. We have been focusing on verbs written in the simple past tense using an -ed ending and created a thesaurus of words for ‘said’ using vocabulary from the text. In the story, there are lots of onomatopoeias so the children created a poem using onomatopoeias. Next week we will apply all these skills when we write our own versions of the story.

We have started a new art topic ‘Funny faces and fabulous features’. We were very lucky to have Mrs Holgate join us for our art lesson where we discussed what a portrait was and thought about where we had seen portraits before. This week we were focusing on using collage as the technique to make our portraits. We looked at a variety of collage portraits before making our own versions. This was great fun, so much so, we couldn’t stop laughing at the funny faces! The children enjoyed sharing their collages with the whole school in the Celebration Assembly.

Ferrari Class are super geographers! In our topic ‘Our wonderful World’ we have started learning about the four countries of the United Kingdom. Using a globe and map, the children have learnt that the United Kingdom (UK) is a union of four countries: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales and a capital city is a city that is home to the government and ruler of a country. They have also identified the capital cities using a key. Edan has shown an exceptional knowledge and is our class Geography expert – well done Edan!

Finally, last Friday we had great fun coming to school in our PJ’s for the House Points treat! We had lots of snuggly outfits which came in handy when listening to our class story!

Well done Ferrari for another two weeks of being the best you can be!

Week 9 and 10

It has been a very busy two weeks with lots of exciting learning opportunities and events. Ferrari Class have taken part in STEM Week and had a wonderful visit to Naples Zoo.

Here are our highlights.

We returned from half term to STEM Week. On Monday Mrs Grady visited our classroom and challenged us to made our own Ferrari car. We learnt that vehicles are made for lots of different purposes. Formula One cars are designed and made to move with a lot of power and at very fast speeds. They are lightweight and agile, which means they can travel around corners easily as well as accelerate in straight lines.

We learnt about wheels, chassis and axils in cars. We selected and tested materials to find out what would work best to make our cars go straight and fast. We discussed what made a car aerodynamic and how the force of friction would affect our model car. Once we tested our models we had the opportunity to adapt them if they did not work well. One of the problems we had was that the wheels kept falling off! We used glue or blue tac to try and solve this problem.

At 12:00 we tested our cars to see how far they could travel. We used metre sticks to measure the distance they travelled. Here are our results:

To finish our activity, Mrs Grady launched a water rocket which went 50 metres high! It was great fun and we learnt a lot!

For the rest of our STEM we focused on a Design and Technology challenge which was to investigate, design and build a shelter. We started by walking around our school environment to find different types of shade and shelter. We discussed the designs and looked at what materials they were made of. We then planned a shelter for a pet with Mrs Robinson before making a prototype. This was great fun. We enjoyed working on this with our grown-ups. Finally, we put all our knowledge and skills to the test by making a play den with our friends. We had to be collaborative and work as a team. Every group made fantastic dens which were fun to play in and protected us from the elements! Great work Ferrari!

On Wednesday we visited Naples Zoo so we could learn about the different species of animals in the zoo; focusing on animal groups, conservation and endangered species. This linked to our science topic ‘Animal and Human senses’. Before hand, we learnt about the five main animal groups and endangered species. We designed mini posters about two endangered species, the Amur Leopard and the Brown Pelican. At the zoo we carried a clipboard and worksheet. Our activity was to make an animal group tally of all the animals we saw. We also drew our favourite reptile, mammal and bird too. Did you know, the most popular group was the mammal group. Other than Alex, the rest of us didn’t spot any fish, so there was nothing to tally! Eating lunch at the zoo was exciting as lots of pigeons and peacocks came to see us. In the afternoon, we went around the small/farm animals. We LOVED the guinea pigs! We found some dandelions and enjoyed feeding them – they squeaked with pleasure. Going to the zoo was a great learning experience.

Back at school, we reflected on our wonderful trip and have written a short recount of our visit. We have thought about zoos and what we liked seeing and have used our mapping skills to design and make our own zoo making sure we included animals from all five groups.

Well done Ferrari – some great learning!

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