Welcome to Denmark class! We are a Specialist Resource Base (SRB) providing specialist teaching for children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN). We work very closely with our speech therapy colleagues. Places at our SRB are allocated by the Local Authority.
Mrs. King and Mrs. Hunter are our teachers. Ms. Wilson and Miss Slaney are our teaching assistants.
Our class is supported by an NHS speech therapist at various times across the week.
We have had so much fun exploring our forest school area this week. We were lucky enough to experience all different weather conditions in the forest – from wet and windy to misty and foggy! The children had fun creating shelters and beds to keep warm. The children were also inspired to make natural Christmas tree decorations from a beautiful branch they found! We created ladybirds from seeds we found around the Cherry trees and had lots of fun on the swings.
We explored what our senses can tell us about religion and belief. To understand the importance of our senses, we explored a piece of chocolate using one sense at a time- taste was our favourite! We learnt about how Hinduism uses all the senses during worship. It was interesting looking at the objects used during puja (the act of Hindu worship).
When we returned from break on Monday, we discovered a big mess in our role play area! One of us spotted that there was a soft toy in the tree! We went to investigate and look for clues. We were so surprised to find other toys hiding! A bear in a box, a ladybird in the shop area and a kangaroo sleeping in the bed of the little house! Thankfully, we all managed to find a toy. We then named our toys and thought about adjectives we could use to describe them. We came up with some really good ideas and worked hard on writing sentences about them!
Over the past few weeks we have been learning about ‘painting’ in our art lessons. We learnt how to name and label parts of a paintbrush and we sorted our paintbrushes by size. We learnt to use the ‘dip, dip, dab’ technique to help us have better control when using paint. We have to dip our paintbrush in water, tap off the excess and dip the brush into the paint. We then dab the brush onto our plain pallet before starting to paint on our page. By holding our paintbrush like a pencil, we learnt that it helps us to have great control of where we want toe paint to go.
We have begun learning about the artist Mondrian and using his art work to inspire our art pieces. We cannot wait to complete our final art piece over the next few weeks.
We had lots of fun in the rain at Forest Schools this week! We enjoyed exploring the area and seeing out different it feels in different weather. The children enjoyed exploring the mud kitchen area and enjoyed creating picture menus and creating wonderful dishes and drinks for the adults! The children also expressed an interested in making dens with various ropes, twigs and tarps, as well as pond dipping to see if they could spot any frogs. With Jules Jackdaw, our forest school lead, the children had fun using the various tools to create different vehicles. Lots of children wanted to build cars and boats out of branches, sticks and wheels. It is so lovely to see their creativity flourish in our outdoor area.
We have had a wonderful start to the year exploring what we know about ‘place value’. We began by working as a team to sort objects by different categories and counting how many were in each set. We used our ‘comparison’ vocabulary to make observations about the different sets. We reminded ourselves how to count objects and actions accurately. We have also been practicing to read numbers as words and making amounts using a variety of equipment. We explored numicon, base ten and bead strings to create amounts.
Today, we went to Gressenhall for our ‘Once Upon a Time’ trip. We had so much fun! Some fairytale items had been stolen from the museum by the Wicked Witch and it was our job to find them! Along the way, we met Griselda (Cinderella’s older sister) who had us doing work on the farm, which included watering, digging up potatoes and doing the washing. We then helped Cinderella with her dusting and found her missing coins. We loved our tractor ride round the farm before lunch! We met a huge Suffolk horse and even saw black turkey chicks! After lunch, we searched for some missing items in the village shop before helping Jack to climb the beanstalk and find the golden egg! We finished up by making potions with the Wicked Witch. Thankfully, we managed to get all the fairytale items returned to the museum. Our imaginations were buzzing today! We had a super time!
We were delighted to be invited to join in with a ‘karate taster session’. We had lots of fun learning about different stances and moves.
As part of our art module this term, the children have been investigating ‘3D art’. We began by looking at pebbles and their properties, before seeing if we can build 3D sculptures with them. We soon discovered that flat, smooth pebbles were the best for building. We then investigated clay and its properties by seeing how it can be manipulated in different ways. We then created 8 different sized pebbles each, making sure we smoothed them out and squashed then to get a flatter shape. We learnt that pebbles aren’t always one colour, so we used a terracotta clay to add embellishments using a ‘slip’. We cannot wait for our pebbles to dry out so that we can create 3D sculptures with them.
The class were so excited to stumble across a shipwreck in our outdoor classroom! Amongst the broken boat, the children spotted lots of different objects and items. One by one the children took it in turns to talk about what they could see and collected the item. Back in the classroom, we made a list of all these curiosities and discovered that they made a poem! The poem is called ’10 things found in a shipwrecked sailor’s pocket’ by Ian McMillan. We will be using this poem as our model text and we will be innovating our own version based on the things we may find in a fairytale land!
