St. David's Day
"March brings breezes, loud and shrill,
To stir the dancing daffodil."
The Garden Year by Sara Coleridge
Oh I do love the month of March, and I love daffodils,
but instead of breezes we had a rather wet start to the month!
Despite a rather wet week, the children in Robin's have embraced all that we have done this week and it has been lovely to see how eager they have been to continue their learning at home!
On Monday after a heartwarming collective worship where we celebrated our friends receiving hearts for showing acts of kindness, good manners, friendship etc we came back together as a class and talked about our Christian value of Friendship. We then learnt how to make origami friendship foxes, decorating them with facial features and then we gave our foxes to a friend so that everyone in Robins had a friendship fox. What made this even more special was that some of our Robins then went home and made more friendship foxes and brought them back in to school and spread even more friendship foxes around the rest of the school, spreading friendship far and wide!
Robins absolutely love Dance on a Monday and this week they enjoyed practising moving their bodies in different ways from nodding, shaking and turning their heads to twisting, wobbling and bending their knees we were bopping to the beat of the music!!
We then continued to practice negotiating space and moving in time to the music, recognising when the music stops and moving in different ways around the room. The children loved listening carefully for the music to stop and finding their cone when it did! Apologies for the blurriness of the photos but it is so so tricky taking a photo of the children when they are moving around non stop!
This week in Maths Robins have been focusing on comparison quantities and using language such as 'more than', 'less than' and 'equal to' to describe the relationship between numbers. We have used the Numberblocks to help us with our comparison activities, ordering them from 1-8 and the children have chosen to take their Maths into their free flow and made the Numberblocks out of cubes and put them in order!
When Mrs Higgins asked if Welsh cakes could be made in cooking club this week the challenge was set....a vegan recipe was found and from that moment on the rest is history! We discussed with the children why we were making them and what day was coming up on Friday, of course, it was St David's Day!
As we mixed our ingredients and the dough took shape, we could see how our Welsh cakes were coming together! We rolled out our dough and the children carefully used the cutter to cut them into shape. This week was extra special as the children got to see their creations being cooked, an actual live cooking show! As we cooked them in the frying pan, a delicious smell started to fill the room and as we turned them over we could see them starting to brown over....they were ready and so were we! Robins were amazing at trying them, with most of them trying them for the first time and also most of Robins eating all of their Welsh cake!!
The remaining Welsh cakes were enjoyed at the staff meeting that evening, all with excellent feedback!
On Wednesday, we welcomed our next Mystery Reader in to the classroom - if we thought last week's anticipation was intense then this week was almost off the scale, it would appear that the excitement and suspense is growing week on week. Thank you to Mrs Keane who joined us this week. Yet again the Robins were the perfect audience, they listened carefully to one of the books from the Winnie the Witch series and joined in with the repetition of the text - waiting for Mrs Keane to hold her finger in the air before they all joined in with the magic word - Abracadabra - what a way to promote the love of reading - fantastic!
On Friday we saw the arrival of the month of March. It will come as no surprise to you that I always look forward to March – Spring is in the air and of course what better way to start the month than with a celebration, especially one as close to my heart as the celebration of St. David’s Day. I wore my daffodill with pride, a sign of my welshness – my belonging, my identity, my being part of something – my ‘hiraeth’ as we would say in Wales. Also, my heart was melting when Spencer arrived with a bunch of daffodils for me and Mrs Bell left a lovely note for me - again, giving that sense of belonging - in the school community. I would like to think that we as a school offer that similar sense of belonging – wearing the school uniform with the school badge, giving that sense of pride.
We also spread the welshness in class - daffodils and welsh cakes were offered to all the EYFS and KS1 children to take home and welsh cakes were offered to the staff with their cups of tea! I do love St. David's day.....but I am already planning what we can offer for St. Patrick's day later on in the month - any suggestions or Irish relatives who fancy coming in to talk about St.Patrick's day celebrations will be more than welcome to come in and visit us! Just let us know.
Having checked the weather, we decided against our welly walk this Friday, besides, we had something else far more important to get on with - we can't reaveal what exactly that is yet but as with all good things - they take time! You will just have to wait a little longer.
Have a great weekend and see you all on Monday
Don't forget World Book Day on Thursday -
please bring in your favourite book, it does not have to be related to your costume,
as we will be creating some activities around your book!