Chinese New Year in Reception

In Reception we have been joining in with the festivities and celebrations of Chinese New Year. To welcome the year of the rabbit we have explored textures whilst making dragon masks and created a dragon dance in the playground.

We have also learnt the story of the 'Great Race' which explains the animal name given to each year in China. Can your child remember which animal came first in the race across the river? This story has helped us to learn ordinal numbers in maths.

After our Chinese dinner gave us a taste for their tasty cuisine we enjoyed trying other Chinese treats on Friday. I think egg fried rice was the favourite!

This week, we will be encouraging the children to have a go at making a brilliant puppet dragon, brought in by Sophie. In P.E. we will watching a lion dance before creating our own in groups to finish off our fun Chinese celebration.

Photos to follow!

Thanks for your continued support,

The Foundation Stage Team

A busy week for Year 5!

It's going to be a busy week this week for Year 5! We are off to Boston Spa High School to have a 'taster' morning, playing different sports with pupils from other local schools then we will be performing our Class Assembly on Friday. We'll hopefully be posting some photos at the end of the week.

Young Voices

Forty three children and five adults left Bardsey on Wednesday 25th January to arrive at Sheffield Arena for the Young Voices concert 2011. We were all incredibly excited and eager to sing all the songs we had been learning over the past few months.

We had lots of fun singing and dancing amongst hundreds of children, performing to a very large audience.

By the end of the day we were very tired but it was all worth it!

Jack and the Beanstalk

Year 6 worked together to create a stop frame animation of Jack and the Beanstalk. Have a look at our film and watch out for the imaginative ending.

Y6 Scientists enjoyed a day with chocolate!

Four pupils from Y6 took part in a science competition at Gateways school. They found out about how chocolate was made and carried out different investigations into the properties of chocolate. Points were awarded for each investigation and prizes given to the best team in each round. We won two rounds and were the winners overall. Well Done!

WATCH OUT: dinosaurs are let loose in Reception!

This week in Reception we are learning all about dinosaurs. In literacy, the children are learning the features of information texts whilst finding out lots of dinosaur facts. The most memorable being that a t - rex could have eaten a human in one big bite! Once we are dinosaur experts we will be making our own dinosaur information books.

In numeracy, we are sorting dinosaurs by their properties and making comparisons between quantities. We are also moving onto subtraction, as a hungry t - rex will come and eat some of the other dinosaurs!

On the creative side, we are making dinosaurs and a dinosaur setting for their habitat before beginning to make fossils.

Please come and visit us for stay and play on Thursday to see what we are getting upto and to share any ideas/books/fossils you may have.

Thanks for all your support,

The Foundation Stage Team

Reception and the friendly giant!

After our Christmas holidays we found a gigantic letter waiting for us! There was only one person it could be from...the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. From his letter we found out that he really was a friendly giant who needed our help to say sorry to Jack.

The giant also delivered a very strange kit for growing a beanstalk. The kit included:

• baked beans
• tin opener
• black paper
• and glitter!

Unfortunately, the kit was not very successful for us! We decided we must be missing some of giant's magic to make the beans grow.

Luckily, we had much more success in our other giant themed activities including writing fantastic letters to the Giant and painting different Jack and the Beanstalk characters. Furthermore, using positional language whilst hunting for hidden golden treasure.

The giant provided a brilliant start to the term and the children are still watching the growth of different beans in our classroom in the hope of a huge beanstalk.