1L South Parade

Wow, we have had a message from Australia!  Check out the messages.  I have lots of plans for the blog this year, and maybe we can make contact with children our own age on the other side of our planet!  Watch this space.

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas.  Thank you for all my lovely presents, which I opened on Christmas Day.  Did you manage to wait?

Not many days now!  I’ve sent the letters to Santa that we wrote in class, but if you were off poorly or forgot to put something on you list, then you might want to send him an email.  Visit this site to send emails, play games and find out about Santa.  You can also find out where he is delivering presents by visiting the NORAD site from the link on the front page.

http://www.canadapost.ca/dec/santa/default-e.asp

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

It has been hard work, but we finished everything!  Today we packed everything up in our bags that Mr Lewis bought and finished watching the Muppets’ Christmas Carol.  We have been watching it a little at a time and talking about the story.  We have talked about what it was like in the past.  We also talked about how we all have to make choices, just like Ebenezer Scrooge.  We don’t want to end up like Marley and Marley, although some children thought it would be cool to meet the ghosts!

Finally, a really big thankyou to all the children who gave me a card or a present.

For our calendars this year we decided to make a cat montage.  We first designed our cat.  It could be any sort of cat from around the world.  Kieran D decided to make a lion.  We then used shapes to cut our a rectangle for the body, a circle for the head, thin rectangles for the legs and triangles for the ears.  We then had to carefully stick the pieces of felt on to card with PVA glue.  Mr Lewis took a photo of us with the digital camera.  We had to make the cat face expression we wanted.  We then used tissue paper to design our backgrounds.  Mr Lewis stuck our faces on at home, but had a disaster, when the glue he used made the ink run.  We discussed the problem and learnt from the mistake.  As you can see they turned out well in the end!

We had a pantomime on Thursday afternoon.  On Friday morning we discussed what we thought about the performance.  Most children thought it was excellent and really enjoyed it.

We have been working hard on our Christmas Story, but we still had time to have a great party.  We made paper chains to decorate our classroom, we had to make a repeating pattern using 10 of each colour paper.  We made wise men hats for our party, which linked to our Christmas Story.

We started our party in the classroom, with pass the parcel.  Mrs Harrison had wrapped the parcel, so it kept us all guessing how many layers there would be! Ella won the prize.  We then went into the hall to have our Christmas party food.  Everyone was very sensible and we had a great time.

Here is a picture of 1L hard at work getting ready for Christmas.  We have been writing the Christmas Story.  It is hard work and we learn so much.  Children have their own targets for improvement over the 13 pages.  Some of the things we are learning are; learning to copy from a board, form our letters correctly, leave finger spaces, write full stops, write on the line, making our writing smaller, being neat, etc.

The picture also shows children extending their printing skills, by learning how to use sponges for printing.  The children had to create a repeating pattern, try to keep their rows straight and also keep the columns in line.  Mrs Lewis saw me wrapping them and thought that we could have sold them in a shop.

Sorry we have not posted for a few weeks.

First, we had some very sad news, which has meant that Mrs Nangle has not been at school to help in the classroom.  We are all thinking of her at this sad time.

Second, we have been rushed off our feet getting ready for Christmas, and with just me it has been hard work making sure that the essentials are done.  Blogging has had to take a back seat!

Third, I have had a problem uploading new photos, and it is only tonight that I have found out that Edublogs have reduced the size of the storage for free accounts to 20MB.  This has left me with a quandary, work within the free 20MB (so having to delete old posts more often), or pay 39 US Dollars and get 5GB of storage.  I’ve decided that I will pay and this should allow me and my class to experiment with some exciting new ideas, such as pod-casting and video casting.

Well done 1L and 2G.  We both won the Headteacher’s Trophy this week by collecting 5 golden tickets.  We have to share the trophy, but luckily both classes get their own bowl of sweets!