Sycamore Class

Welcome to Sycamore Class

Classteacher: Miss S. Campbell

Summer Term 

PE days

Monday -   Miss Campbell - Athletics focus: 

We will be focusing on running for distance, developing great fluency and efficiency, sustaining pace over a long distance, as well as practising relay - working together as a team, taking turns in different roles. 

Tuesday - Colchester United Coach Ben - Scatterball 

Drawing Portraits

Sycamore Class enjoyed being artists for the afternoon. They followed a step by step guide drawing their partners face. We spoke about the shape of our lips and eyelids. They all really enjoyed this activity. WOW we certainly have some fantastic portrait artists in the class. We spoke about different drawing and shading techniques. Well done Sycamore Class. 

Week commencing 8th July 2024

Some of Sycamore Class in their new Year 2 Class (Cedar and Larch). 

Exhibition Evening

Just wanted to thank you all for joining our Exhibition Evening. Sycamore Class have worked tremendously hard this year. It has been great to show you all of their work. I am super proud of them!

You will be getting all of their work on the last day of term. Please can your child bring in a bag ready for Friday. 

Week commencing 1st July 2024

Week commencing 24/06/24

It was such a delight to see Sycamore class competing with other year groups. Everyone put so much effort into sports day including parents. It was so nice to see so many adults getting involved with sports day. Well done! 

Congratulations to team Germany. 

Art- 3D model making

Sycamore enjoyed having visitors on Wednesday for their art lesson. The children were given 2 resources (card and scissors) and were shown lots of different ways how to merge their card together without using glue or tape. They were able to create some wonderful masterpieces! I am so impressed with how creative and hardworking the class were. We had cats, sheep, aeroplane, people (mummies and daddies), robots and much more- all made from card! They looked incredible! 

Week commencing 17/06/24

We have had a lovely week in Sycamore class, the children have worked so hard (especially in History and Science). We are currently planning our suspense story for English - Adventure at Dragon forest. The children have come up with some fantastic ideas towards their story. We cannot wait for you to read them! In Maths we have continued to practice time (O'clock and Half Past) we have been linking this to real life aspects for when we might need to use a clock to tell the time. In Science we continue to learn about the different types of habitats and have started to make out own habitats including animals in the food chain. It has been great to see Sycamore remember so many facts about The Great Fire of London. We created our own Tudor houses this week and compared the houses to the ones we live in today. 

NEXT WEEK - 

Monday PM- Sports day Practice 

Wednesday- Artist visitor in the morning.  

Friday AM- Sports day! Please make sure children bring a water bottle into school. 

Science - animals in their habitat

Maths- O'clock

With Sports Day approaching at Myland, we joined our teams to make our countries flag. Everyone in Sycamore was very excited to go into different classes to meet their team. In Sycamore class we had India and Philippines. 

Maths -Time

Sycamore Class have worked very hard this week learning to tell the time. We have focused on o'clock and half past. The children were very excited to know how to tell the time ready for lunch! We have used our clocks outside this week to play 'What's the time Mr. Wolf!. 

Maths- Position and Direction

We have been outside using our imaginary pirate map to help us learn with our position and direction. The children had to work in pairs moving around the cones using our key vocabulary (left, right, forwards, backwards) to get safely to the other side of the playground. 

Science - Food Chains

We were researching creatures in larger habitats (lions, elephants, hippos, sharks) and exploring questions to why do these living things live there? We spoke about different types of habitats and labelled our own food chains. 

We thought about some simple food chains and made a food chain from the living things we found in the school grounds. We explored outside using our detective scientist eyes to find living things such as leaves, grass, ladybirds, worms and spiders to create a small food chain. The children were able to remember the start of the food chain (sun) and explain why the sun is so important to living things. Well done Sycamore Class!

PE- 

Developing greater fluency, coordination and basic skills for acceleration

English- Suspense writing

Sycamore have been busy writing their suspense stories. They have been very creative and have explored lots of different suspense vocabulary to use in their writing as well as using ellipse. At the end of their story writing the children read their stories to each other.  

Art - Printing using different materials. 

Friday May 17th

The highlight of this week was seeing how amazing our castles have turned out! We had a fantastic time finishing them today - we are very pleased with them.

Have a lovely weekend!

Miss Kourlas

Friday May 3rd 2024

We had a wonderful week! Specifically, we had a grand time making our dragon eyes. We each made one out of air dry clay and them painted them when they were dried. We also finger painted dragons for our eyes to go on. They will all be put together next week - I am so excited to share them when they are finished!

Have a great long weekend!

Miss Kourlas

Monday 29th April 2024

We had a fantastic time at Jimmy's Farm last Monday! We were so excited to see all sorts of animals. I think we were particularly excited to see camels, bears, and snakes (which some of decided to pet)!

Friday 19th April 2024

We had a wonderful week back! Here are the highlights:
We talked lots about heights and lengths, and had a very memorable time measuring my height with cubes... apparently I am 100 cubes tall. This afternoon we went outside to look at the physical features of our school (see the photos below)!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Miss Kourlas

Friday 27th March 2024

Today we finally had a chance to look at the ducklings and have a little investigation - we recorded how many cheeps each duckling made per minute! Bob had the most at 55 cheeps.

I believe that in this photo (see below) the duckling I am holding is Amy, who we named as a class! If you think our faces look very serious, that is because we were concentrating really hard on how many cheeps this little one made - we counted 35!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Miss Kourlas

Tuesday March 26th 2024

Today was ROMAN DAY! All of Key Stage 1 had a fantastic time dressing up as either Romans, Boudica or anyone part of the Iceni Tribe. Below is a class photo of us all in our wonderful costumes. We completed many Boudica and Roman related activities - one of which was brought home today!

Miss Kourlas and Miss Brown

Friday 22nd March

Sycamore class was incredibly excited to see the ducklings that arrived in Key Stage 1 this week. Next week we will be conducting an investigation looking at five little ducklings, all who have hatched from their eggs. We also got to name one of the ducks, who we decided to call Amy!

Here is a photo of two of our new friends!

Miss Kourlas

Friday 8th of March, 2024

Everyone has been working very hard in maths this week! We have started learning about fractions, with a focus on halves, quarters and thirds. Perhaps the children can show what they know at home using their snacks!

We have also had fun learning more about frogs, which has to do with our new Big Reading theme "Fanatical about Frogs"! We have been learning about non-fiction texts, such as fact files. We are very excited to start learning how write one on our own fact files next week.

Miss Kourlas

Friday 19th January 2024

The children have been working hard this week and I have been impressed with how good they are now at counting in 10s!  Please encourage your child to practise this with you at home too, including counting backwards!

We have created wonderul list poems about The Woodland this week in English and the children were able to use their senses to describe their settings too.

Miss Kourlas and Mrs. Brown

Friday 12th January 2024

The children have had a busy first week back and I have been getting to know all the children in Sycamore Class.  We have enjoyed creating art inspired by Andy Goldsworthy.  We used natural materials to create the patterns we could see in our new text 'Think of an Eel'.  The children have also read this book with a friend and created storyboards to help them become very familiar with the story.   

In Maths we have been representing numbers up to 100 in a variety of ways and we all enjoyed learning actions to go with our new model text 'Journey to the Sargasso'.

Have a super weekend!

Miss Kourlas and Mrs. Brown

Week beginning 11^th December

A massive well done to the whole of Sycamore class for their wonderful performances in our Nativity play this week!

We also had a lovely trip to the library on Thursday. We enjoyed reading and exploring some beautiful books and we found some new books related to our new topic for Spring term.

Merry Christmas and have a lovely break!

Week beginning 27^th November

In English this week, we learned how to present and punctuate a poem. We then planned our own poem about pets, which we will finish writing next week.

In maths, we explored lines of symmetry and created repeated patterns with 2D shapes. We also worked hard to solve some tricky questions on our maths assessments.

We also performed an investigation in Science whilst testing materials. Do your grown-up's think 'crispies', 'marshmallows' or 'biscuits' helped the road be stronger?

Week beginning 20^th November

We have continued our shape learning in maths this week. We have been counting the vertices and sides of 2D shapes and solving shape related problems.

We are now much more confident when using the Chromebooks in Computing lessons. This week we had to draw and fill different shapes to create a piece of digital art that looked similar to ‘The Snail’ by Henri Matisse.

In English, we have been exploring poems and we have learned a poem called ‘A bird is’. Next week we will continue working with this poem. Can you remember any of it at home?

Week beginning 6^th November

In English this week, we have been focussing on our writing targets and planning a new diary entry written from the perspective of a kangaroo. We had to plan where they were bouncing to, where they had lunch and what they did in the afternoon. We also had to think about the kangaroo’s emotions and writing in first person.

In Science, we have started to learn about materials. We identified lots of objects around the classroom and what material they are made from. We also started to describe the properties of these materials. Can you identify any materials in your home?

Week beginning 30^th October

In English this week, we started exploring diary entries. We looked at the features of diaries then learned a diary entry written by a swan.

In maths we have been consolidating our subtraction methods. Some of us took a number of objects away from a whole amount, some of us counted back on an empty number line and some of us partitioned numbers to take away the tens and ones separately. We also bought out new maths ‘KIRF’ home this week about number bonds to six.

In Science, we learned about the season ‘Autumn’ and created some beautiful autumnal art for our ‘Season’ display.

Week beginning 16^th October

In English this week, we had a brilliant go at writing a Cinderella story independently. We worked hard to try and include clear, finger spaces, adjectives and punctuation.

In maths we have been continuing working on our addition and subtraction skills. We have been using number lines, objects, our fingers and counting on or back as methods. We also started to look at partitioning two-digit numbers to help us.

In Science, we performed a simple investigation using pepper and soap. Can you remember what happened to the pepper when the finger was covered in soap? This investigation helped us understand how important it is to use soap when washing our hands.

This afternoon we made a trip to the library to collect some beautiful new books for our classroom.

Have a great half term!
 

Week beginning 9^th October

In English this week, we have started to innovate the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ text that we learned last week with our new ideas about Jack from ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.

In maths we have been subtracting. We have been counting backwards in our heads, on number lines and taking away objects from an amount to solve subtractions. We have also used part-part-whole models to represent this.  

In D.T. this week we made ‘Revolting Pizzas’! We carefully followed our designs from last week to create and evaluate our ‘Revolting Pizzas’ made with biscuit bases.

Week beginning 2^nd October

In English this week we have been identifying and using adjectives, verbs and similes. We learned that adjectives describes nouns (an object, place or person), verbs are words used for actions or movements and similes describe something as something else. We made some wonderfully creative similes to describe the height of trees and the roundness of someone’s eyes.

In maths we have been adding. We now understand that adding is combining two amounts or values together. We have used part-part-whole diagrams and box models to represent how addition can be done in any order.

In Science we have continued learning about healthy eating and organising food into the five main food groups. We have discussed how the best way to get everything we need from food is to eat a varied and balanced diet.

Week beginning 25th September

Well done Sycamore class! We are incredibly proud of the independent writing you have done today after a week of learning the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ story. You all worked incredibly hard to include story language and extra details as well as working on your writing targets.

We have also been comparing numbers in maths this week and we started to use the ‘more than’, ‘less than’ and ‘equals’ signs as well as the language.

In Computing this week, we logged on to the Chromebooks and developed our mouse skills by drawing pictures on ‘paintz.app’. We had lots of fun changing the colours and using the different tools. 

Beginning of Autumn 1

Well done to everyone in Sycamore class for a wonderful start to the year. We have been working hard to get used to our new routines and we have jumped straight into our learning.

In phonics we have been revisiting lots of the phase 3 digraphs and trigraphs we learned in Reception. We have then blended them in words to read and segmented them for spelling. We have also been reading and spelling ‘tricky’ words.

In English we have been learning about instructions. We learned that instructions include a title, introduction, ‘what you need’ list, numbered steps, time openers and imperative/bossy verbs. We then tried to use these features when writing our own instructions about dressing the Big Bad Wolf as a Grandma and helping someone get ready for a ball.

In maths we have been learning about numbers and place value. We have been counting forwards and backwards, ordering numbers, finding one more and one less and partitioning numbers up to 20. We have been using lots of different resources to help us represent the value of numbers and understand what they are made of.

We have been very lucky this week as we have been testing some different foods in class. We tried and tested possible pizza bases in D.T. and explored our senses in Science when tasting different fruits. 

We have also made some beautiful artwork for our classroom. We have been using oil pastels, chalks and paint to create different textures and effects. We hope you like them when you come to visit our classroom.