Wow, what a great first half-term we have had in Deer Class! There have been lots of new experiences and routines for Deer Class to get used to and the children have done a great job at settling down to the new way of learning. That step up from Reception is an extra big leap for little legs! 

This half-term we have worked really hard at developing our writing skills and we have loved discovering how our new Writing Legends scheme can make learning even more enjoyable! When we are not working with a grown up to complete our writing, we are able to use the school Chromebooks to log-in to our own virtual world where we can play fun interactive activities to help us develop everything from our vocabulary knowledge to the structure of sentences. This half-term we explored the features of a fantasy story and created our own three-sentence story about a character in an imaginary land. 

We have completed our Place Value unit in Maths and have started our Addition and Subtraction unit, spending the last week looking at part-whole models and thinking about how they can help us in our exploration of numbers. 

We loved our History unit looking at childhood in the past, in which we thought about our own personal history and our place in the world. We learned that timelines help us to see events that have happened from the past all the way to the present (today) and we ordered photos of ourselves on our own personal timeline. We were also lucky enough to have one of Fernhurst's volunteer readers, Rosemary, come in to talk to us about her own childhood so that we could discover how different our lives are now to those of children in the past. We learned some very interesting facts, including how Rosemary's mummy had to handwash her chidlren's cloth nappies and hang them out to dry to be re-used; we found this very funny!

In DT this half term, we explored mechanisms and looked at how we can use levers and sliders to make our own moving storybook. We practised making some levers and sliders to understand how they help images to move and then we worked hard at designing our storybooks, which were based on the story of Humpty Dumpty. We had to think carefully about which parts we wanted to move, and which mechanism we would need to use. We then tested our storybooks on the children in Squirrels class and afterwards, completed an evaluation to decide how successful our product was. 

Moving into October and the wetter, darker days has really helped us in our Science unit learning about the Seasons. We have been able to use our lovely grounds to explore the changes that are happening to the trees and weather. Many of us have loved bringing Miss Ridge the Autumn leaves that we found on our journey to school in the mornings! We made a weather mobile to show the days, months and weather in each season, we looked at how temperature is affected by the changing seasons, and we explored what happens to trees in Autumn and why deciduous trees lose their leaves.