Today, our Digital Leader help us take part in an assembly task all about being kind online. We discussed the importance of speaking to a trusted adult if we ever see anything online that upsets or worries us. We also learned that we should always think before we send and make sure our words and actions are kind and respectful to others. We are learning how to stay safe online and be responsible digital citizens!
Today, 1 Grove enjoyed their Smiley Reward with Funda, and what an amazing time we had! It wasn’t just one giant inflatable… we had TWO giant inflatables!
We had so much fun climbing up the ladders and zooming down the slide. Then we switched groups and got to take part in an exciting obstacle course and challenge our friends to see who could make it through the fastest!
What a fantastic reward for Year 1! We had the best time and made some wonderful memories together.
Today, we had our RRR class assembly, where we celebrated all the fantastic learning we have been doing this half term!
We chanted our 2s and 10s times tables, shared some of our target words and looked back at our DT rainbow wraps, our Geography local area walk and our Science materials hunt.
We are so impressed with how much we have learnt and how much we can remember! We will continue to RRR (Recall, Revisit and Remember) our important key learning to help us build strong foundations for the future. Well done, Year 1!
Thanks you to everyone who came an watched us!
Today, Year 1 took part in an exciting computing workshop with Smoothwall!
We learnt how to stay safe online and discovered that not everything we see on the internet is real. We had lots of fun taking part in quizzes, deciding whether pictures were real or fake and created using AI. We even managed to beat Ruth!
We then created our own Power of 5, identifying five trusted adults we can talk to if we ever feel worried about something we see online. We are learning how to stay safe, make sensible choices and ask for help when we need it!
Today we had a visit from a librarian from Bolton Library!
She read us a story called ‘I Am A Tiger’ and it was so exciting! She used puppets to help bring the story to life! We really enjoyed listening to the story and hearing all about the fun activities at Bolton Library.
This week, we have talked about Black History Month! We know there are lots of important people in the past and Black History Month is all about celebrating important black people from the past.
We enjoyed the assembly this week with Mrs Johnston-Sweeney (our History subject leader) who is launching a Black History Month competition! We are very excited to take part in this at home!
We reminded ourselves about some of the important black people from the past who we could choose to look at for our competition entries.
Today is National Poetry Day! We are so lucky to have enjoyed an author visit from Miles Salter. He is an author and a poet! He started by singing us a very exciting song that we loved! He read us some fun poems and we started to look at rhyming words together. Then we used the rhyming words to create a poem together.
He also told a very exciting story and used us as actors! It was really funny and we all had a great time!
Today we have enjoyed a walk around our KS1 playground, looking for signs of Autumn. We found lots of old leaves in the ground. We know that deciduous leaves fall from the trees every Autumn, but evergreen trees keep their leaves all year round. We loved all the beautiful colours on the leaves that we found! We also found some sycamore spinner seeds that had fallen from the trees too.
We talked about how Autumn affects animals too, especially animals getting ready for hibernation or birds that fly south for the winter. We enjoyed seeing some time-lapse videos of how plants and animals change throughout the season on Autumn.
We now have an Autumn box set up in our classroom, so if you find any beautiful Autumn deciduous leaves or any other signs of Autumn, please bring them in and put them the box so we can all enjoy looking at them!
We have really enjoyed our Geography morning! It was lovely to see so many families come into our classroom to find out about our Geography learning!
We showed our vocabulary chanting and actions, as well as our new song all about the United Kingdom! We then enjoyed creating a jigsaw of the United Kingdom with our adult, and labelling the countries, capital cities and seas.
Well done, Year 1 Grove!
We are so lucky at Oxford Grove that we have so many pupil leadership roles! These are how children can help teachers and our school in lots of different ways. These roles are very useful for us because they teach us lots of different skills, such as organisation, responsibility, accountability, teamwork and problem-solving.
Some of us have successfully applied for roles in school and now we have our badges to show that we are on the committees! We have already started working with the teachers to help improve and support Oxford Grove!
We also have an Arts Council member and a Digital Leader!
Our teacher, Mrs Thompson, is in charge of the Digital Leaders. They help Mrs Thompson with lots of different things in school, including technical support for teachers, supporting their class with online safety and leading different technology and online safety research projects across school.
If you want to see more about what they get up, click to visit our Digital Leader blog.
Today we were very lucky to watch a live event with our class author Julia Donaldson and hear her brand-new book, Gruffalo Granny!
We were so excited to be some of the very first children in the country to hear this new Gruffalo adventure! What a special experience! It had all the characters we know and love and the same cheeky mouse who was up to his same old tricks with the Gruffalo family!
What was your favourite part of the story? Can you tell your grown-up what happened?
What a wonderful afternoon we have had! We are so excited to have taken part in our first ever Sports Afternoon at Oxford Grove!
We were put into teams and we took part in fun races – a sprinting race and an egg and spoon race!
We had such a lovely time, and we were all so happy to take part! I was so proud to see your sportsmanship and resilience, Year 1 Grove – well done!
Today, we had such a great time on our local area walk! We walked along Shepherd Cross Street and looked at some of the human features and physical features of our local area. We enjoyed talking about the places we have been before with our families, such as the shop and the playground. We also saw Oxford Grove across the huge field!
Over the next few weeks, we will be using what we have learned today to apply our Geography skills and create our own maps of the local area!
Year 1 have had an amazing first day back in school – we were so excited to be cooking! This week, we are learning about cooking and nutrition in Design and Technology. We talked about what we learned last year in Reception when we made fruit kebabs. This year, we made rainbow wraps! We sliced lots of different fruits and vegetables using the bridge hold and the claw hold to cut safely and carefully. We enjoyed adding lots of different fruits and vegetables to our wraps, as well as some tasty salsa! We also learned that tomatoes and peppers are actually fruits because the seeds are on the inside!
1 Grove, you have had an amazing transition! Well done to you all, I am so excited to see you all again in September!
– Mrs Thompson
We absolutely love PE and being able to move our bodies! We know that movement is very important for our health, for both our bodies and our minds.
In Year 1, our PE day is Friday. Next term, we are looking forward to developing our skills in:
We are also excited about having lots of opportunities for different PE clubs across the year!
This week, we have really enjoyed looking for different materials in our Year 1 workshop! We talked about the materials – metal, wood, fabric, glass, plastic and other materials too. We identified and talked about how we could recognise these materials. We will be learning all about some of the properties of these materials in our first Science topic!
We are so very lucky that our continuous provision does not stop in Year 1 at Oxford Grove! We have our beautiful Year 1 workshops where we have a reading area, craft area, Computing area, tuff trays and different tables – all with carefully designed tasks matched to foundational knowledge and our Year 1 curriculum!
We are really enjoying exploring the workshop during our transition.
Over the last few weeks in transition, we have been working hard on our maths learning! We have looked at some of our place value skills using RRR from Reception, including:
We have enjoyed working on these skills using lots of practical resources, both in our classrooms and out in our Year 1 workshop!
This week, we have enjoyed reading stories by our Year 1 class author, Julia Donaldson! We have especially enjoyed the classic story of ‘The Gruffalo’.
We have learned that an author is a person who writes books and an illustrator is a person who draws the pictures for books.
We have really enjoyed joining in with repeated phrases in the story, and starting to work on using different voices for different characters.
We are having such a fantastic time in Year 1! This week, we have met our new teachers and been in our new classrooms. We have spent time in our base classes and our flexi groups. We were very excited to see all the beautiful areas in our classrooms, such as the reading areas, writing areas and maths areas. We were also very excited to see the Year 1 workshops, with lots more areas for us all to explore! We are getting used to our new routines and we are enjoying showing our new teachers what we can do!
Reception enjoyed making their own fruit kebabs as part of our D&T Food topic! The children enjoyed selecting their favourite fruits, chopping them into smaller pieces and carefully skewering it in a colourful order.
The best part was eating them at the end, of course!
Reception have a great time building sentences using their colourful semantics, this helps their sentence structure and cohesion! It s also great for their oracy and speaking skills, great work reception!
Reception have had a great time exploring their ingredients for a fruit salad and they had a great go at building sentences around our story! Well done Reception!
Reception have loved observing the life cycle of a butterfly over the last few weeks!
We have watched them start as caterpillars, make cocoons around themselves and eventually turn into beautiful Monarch Butterflies!
Today, we said goodbye to our class butterflies as we released them outside – the children loved getting the chance to hold some of them before they flew off.
Reception have had an extremely fun Friday today as they dressed in their own clothes from home!
Reception have been going ‘beyond 10’ in their maths this half term and have been learning all about numbers to 20!
Today, as part of our current class story, the children enjoyed locating all 20 of the numbered paw prints in the outdoor area in their own Bear Hunt!
Reception are starting to explore their new artist; Andy Goldsworthy! He uses lots of natural materials to make his sculptures so Reception have been exploring what they can use. Great work Reception!
Reception had a great time exploring our story ‘We’re Going On a Bear Hunt’ through re-enacting the story, making a cave for the bear and designing maps linked to our story! Great work Reception!
Reception have done some great work in their science all about minibeasts, in line with our quality first texts. They have been learning about different types of minibeasts, where they live, how to catch minibeasts and how to plant seeds!
Reception have been exploring places and things that are special to different people. They have looked at lots of different artefacts and started to explore which place is special to Christians, before looking at which place is special to Muslims. Good job Reception!
This week, we invited parents to come and observe how we talk through our texts in class, asking lots of valuable questions to promote critical thinking about the books before enjoying reading it together!
Reception have had the best time at Smithills Farm today!
We enjoyed lots of fun activities including donkey and tractor rides, stroking and holding animals at Pet’s Corner, feeding lots of different animals, exploring the Reptile shed and watching the cows get milked!
Reception had a lovely day and represented Oxford Grove brilliantly!
Reception loved discussing what their future dreams and goals are and how they would like to achieve different things along the way. The children spoke about the various careers they would like to try and had lots of fun role-playing and sketching them too.
From firefighters and doctors, to queens and footballers – anything is possible!
Reception have been learning all about different 3D shapes – exploring their names and properties. Today we tried to find as many 3D shapes in our Reception environment as we could!
Reception have enjoyed exploring algorithms using different moving objects such as the BeeBots, the children inputted the instructions for the beebot to follow and watched as the robot completed the task. They then had a go at inputting a variety of algorithms on the class iPads!
Reception have started to explore different places that you might find or go to, particularly the farm and wildlife areas! We have been looking at how a Farm differs to our local area of Bolton before exploring our local area closer, including local parks and our school itself!
Reception are enjoying developing map skills and have even had a go at making different modes of transport that are used for travelling around – including tractors!
As part of our Science topic, Reception have been welcoming the season of Spring by learning all about different features of farms – including the types of animals that they may find on a farm and the names of their young!
Today we celebrated World Book Day by talking all about our favourite books and completing different activities all about the stories we love!
The children enjoyed collaging their own Rainbow Fish, exploring lots of traditional tales, designing their own book covers, having fun with Superworm in the tuff tray and going on a bear hunt with Mr Gavan!
Reception were lucky enough to pay a visit to Year 2 to meet their chicks! Reception are learning Springtime and how lots of new life is brought into the world during this time – including our chicks!
In today’s RE lesson, the children were introduced to the biblical story of Palm Sunday – a time when Jesus arrived to Jerusalem on a humble donkey and was welcomed fondly with praise and palm leaves by the people who lived there.
To assist in the children’s understanding of this event, we had a special visitor arriving on a little donkey of his own – we welcomed ‘Jesus’ with palm leaves and shouts of “Hosanna” for our saviour! We then made our own palm leaves using a variety of collage and colouring resources to celebrate!
Reception have been exploring the signs of spring by seeing what flowers they can see, and exploring how we plant seeds to grow flowers and plants! Well done reception!
Reception used their fine motor skills to make jam sandwiches yesterday! Then, today they have recalled and sequenced the steps, using the key words of now, then and next for their maths learning! Well done reception!
Today, the children explored how big movements can help us refine our fine motor control to be able to write with more accuracy and confidence! The children pinched, pulled and ripped their own streamers before practising some large, gross-motor movements to music.
We then applied this to our writing – demonstrating how important it is to get their bodies moving, dancing and wiggling!
In Reception we are constantly learning lots of new skills, like reading, writing, maths, topic, fine and gross motor skills. But at such a young age it is important for Reception to play and build lots of new communication skills and have a big happy smile on their faces, so today we have captured that for all their fantastic families to see.
Reception used their matching skills to find matching socks and also find the odd ones out. Great work Reception!
Reception explored their new book ‘Children of the world’ and had a look at what different games they could play. They then practised their hide and seek skills following clear instructions on how to play the game. Needless to say, we have some great hide and seek champions! Well done Reception!
Reception used their maths measurement skills to make playdough! Great job reception!
