Ashton Under Hill First School

Shaping Bright Futures Together


23 Hawthorn wb 27 February

We've had a great start back to the new half term filled with lots of new learning opportunities.
In English, the children enjoyed writing their own stories based on a picture of a badger in a park scene. We were impressed with their creativity and had a lovely time reading all their ideas. We then introduced our new book, which is called 'The Disgusting Sandwich', from which the badger picture was taken. The children had a go at acting out the story on Wednesday and then created story maps on Thursday. We've got lots more exciting activities planned based on this wonderful book over the next few weeks while the children develop their writing skills. 
Year 1s have continued their work on numbers up to 50 in maths, while Year 2s have been working on their times tables and related division facts. From this week they'll begin weekly times tables homework, working on the 2s, 5s and 10s.
We started our new topic on Monday. Our whole school theme is 'Looking after our world' and our topic is called 'Street Detectives'. We'll be finding out about the United Kingdom and its settlements. We began by asking the children to carefully paint a map of the UK, showing its four countries in different colours. The children really had to focus on the detail, particularly given the number of small islands around the coast of Scotland! We celebrated St David's Day on Wednesday with Welsh Cakes, very kindly provided by one of our grandparents and the children really enjoyed sampling these traditional goodies!
In Computing, we've also started a new unit - all about data and different ways of representing it. We began with tally charts, using gates and posts to count different types of farm animals and pets. We were also able to ask and answer questions about the data. We'll be moving on to pictograms using a special computer programme during the next few weeks.
In Science and DT we have been continuing with our work on materials and the children have enjoyed making different joins and so that we can join together different items to make freestanding structures.
Finally,  we celebrated World Book Day on Friday and as well as some fantastic costumes, we had lots of fun sharing our books with our classmates, across the school and also finding information and characters in the books we had.  A super day was had by all!