Ashton Under Hill First School

Shaping Bright Futures Together


Oak Week Beginning 9th May 2023

We have started lots of new areas of learning this week, Sound in Science, Raging Rivers in Topic and Position and Direction in maths. We also had great fun on the River Avon!

In Science we have been discovering through investigating how sounds are made. We observed a variety of different vibrations and tested a home made drum with rice on top to see what happened to the rice when the volume of the sound increased. We also made a sound machine with a spoon, some string and an elastic band to further investigate volume.

We had a fantastic introduction to our new topic on rivers during our Bell-Boating session on Wednesday, (see the separate news blog here for more details.) The River Avon is one the rivers we will look at during our study so it was a great learning opportunity. Our first lesson in school was to look at where all the water in our rivers comes from, by looking at the water cycle. We made some super diagrams with the key vocabulary and spent time listening to a Water Cycle song to reinforce our learning. It was a fun way to memorise the facts.

A game of Battleships was how the class were introduced to their new topic in maths. We used this game to remind the pupils about how to read coordinates and plot them on to grids. They revised the names of the X and Y axis from the work we did in statistics and used their shapes knowledge to identify the coordinates of different polygons. Next week we will move onto translating and reflecting shapes.

On Friday, we planted out some of the seeds we germinated last half term; the sunflower seeds are looking really strong. We re-potted the other seeds into larger pots as they need a little more nurturing before they are planted into the beds. We will be trying to make the 'boat', our designated garden space, look more colourful over the next few weeks, if anyone has any spare bedding plants, seeds or seedlings they will be very gratefully received by Oak class and we will look after them very well.

Next week will be a full 5 days - something we haven't experienced for the last couple of weeks, and we have plenty of exciting learning to squeeze into it. We have got lots of plans for the remaining weeks, including hoodie orders, Year 5 leavers events and some more fun on the river at a regatta. Please keep an eye out for dates and details.