Welcome to Dragonfly Class!
The class teacher is Miss Dockerty and the teaching assistants based in Dragonfly Class are Mr Fuller (every morning) and Mrs Venn and Mrs Gardiner.
Key information:
- We have PE on Wednesdays and Friday afternoons. Please come to school wearing your PE kit.
- Show and Tell is on Fridays.
- On a Friday, one child will be chosen as the 'Banwell Bee' for their behaviour and attitude to learning throughout the week. If your child is the Banwell Bee they will bring home our class bear, Ted, for the weekend!
Homework
Supporting your child with reading at home will make a huge difference to their progress at school. We have a reading tree in class, through which we celebrate how many times the children have read at home each week. All of the children are keen to get to the gold star at the top, however our expectation is that your child reads 5 times a week, where possible. We ask that you make a quick note in your child’s reading record book (initials and the date is fine, or a little note if you want to comment) every time you hear your child read.
Show and tell
We love to celebrate home learning in school and show and tell at the end of the day is the perfect opportunity for this. Our Show and Tell Day is a Friday. When your child has continued their learning at home, for example finding something linked to a season on a walk or has got an achievement that they are proud of, maybe a swimming certificate or a boxing medal, please encourage them to bring it in on our show and tell days and they can proudly share their learning with the class.
Academic year 2023-24
Animals Including Humans (Key Stage One Science)
During the first term, the children have enjoyed investigating animals. We have identified different types of animals and used this information to classify them into mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, birds and fish. The children thoroughly enjoyed their workshop in school led by Noah's Ark Zoo and the children really impressed the workshop leaders with their fantastic knowledge and understanding of animals. You can see some photos below of our brilliant morning, where we got to handle animals including a hissing cockroach, a tortoise, a snail and a guinea pig!
During Autumn Term 2, we will continue our work on animals and will be introducing vocabulary including 'herbivore', 'carnivore' and 'omnivore'. We will also be looking more in depth at the human body and will investigate the five senses.
Celebrations!
In Term 2, we will be focusing on Religious Education as one of the core subjects within our project. We will look at a range of different celebrations from different cultures, including Diwali, Firework Night and of course Christmas. We will also be looking at how different people may celebrate birthdays, weddings and births of babies.
Within this project, the children will be given lots of opportunities to get creative and write. We have already written firework poems and created some fantastic firework art. The children will model with clay and create diwa lamps and their own rangoli patterns.
Preparations for our Key Stage One Nativity are now underway. The children are very excited to start rehearsals. We hope you are looking forward to seeing Banwell Primary School Key Stage One's production of 'The Dinky Donkeys'!
Into The Wilderness
We have started our school year with an art and science project called Into The Wilderness.
We have used a book called 'Leaf Man' by Lois Ehlert as a stimulus. Lois Ehlert uses collage techniques in order to illustrate her books. We watched videos of how she collected her natural objects and layered them on top of each other, before photographing them. We collected leaves together in order to make our very own leaf collage pictures (you can see the finished products below!)
We have also been sketching this term. We sketched the habitat where our leaf animal lives, for example a tree for a leaf owl. Once we had done one sketch, we looked at pictures of the real habitats and had another go sketching it a second time - this time our sketches were much more realistic! We have learnt how to use water colour paints and have explored what happens when we add more water and how we could could add different tones of colour to our habitat pictures.
We created our final pieces by creating a spring out of paper, which we used to attach our leaf collage on to the painted sketch. We love how our pieces have turned out! We hope you love them too!
