2A Maths Outdoor Learning

We've been learning Addition and Subtraction in Maths. We decided to get some fresh air and practise our adding and subtracting by playing a game of Snakes and Ladders on our huge, newly painted one hundred square! We had lots of fun! 😀 Thank you Mr Kelly for raising the money for the new playground markings.

2A Phonics

We've been enjoying some outdoor learning this week in 2A. We were practising the /ear/ trigraph in our Phonics lesson!

Green Council look at our school air quality by studying trees!

Today, we had a special visitor to Green Council.
Bike it Ray came with a lot of interesting chart about different animals, poo, and lichens.  He told us that lichens grow on trees and bricks and can tell us a lot about the air quality in our area.

We went for a nature walk to see what we would find in the bottom playground. We were very excited to see lichen on the trees and Bike It Rays said that although there is more to do, the lichens we saw were a healthy green colour and indicate that our air quality is not bad for our infants.  Hooray!

Here we are studying a tree. Do you know what type of tree it is? (clue: the colour is silver!)

Learning in the school garden.

Learning in the School Garden.

The Autumn has arrived in all its beauty. Last week, the children from the gardening club collected samples of coloured leaves from the trees growing around the school playgrounds.

We dried them and used to make snap cards. We stuck the leaves to cards, found out the names of the trees they came from and labelled them. 

Playing the snap game, we could learn the names of 12 trees and one climber from our surroundings,

such as ash: crab apple, birch, wild cherry, maple, prunus, oak, hazel, lime tree, sycamore, willow, cypress and ivy.

The Big Soup Share!

Last week cooking club participated in 'The Big Soup Share'.

This event is part of RHS's campaign for school gardening.

The Big Soup Share was a chance for cooking and gardening clubs to celebrate the work they do in our garden by harvesting your crops, whizzing them up into a delicious soup and sharing it out with others.

I hope everyone enjoyed the onion soup! 

Cooking Club utilise the schools harvested vegetables

This afternoon cooking club made special treats. Mrs Wilk said there was plenty of them made to share around!

The cooking club children are reaping the benefits of gardening club's harvest yesterday.

Wow it is great we can work together and help each other!

The children this afternoon were hard at work: washing the potatoes, carrots and courgettes, peeling them and then grating them all ready for cooking.

I hope the adults at home enjoyed these yummy and healthy rosti's :)

Check back with the blog to see what amazing dishes they will make...

If you would like to make this at home then check out this recipe :)

Gardening club have been harvesting!

After school last week the gardening club harvested potatoes which they had planted and this week it was onions. I could smell those onions from a mile away!

They washed and prepared the vegetables so cooking club can use them to make potato rosti's tomorrow, yummy!

Watch this space for pictures of the delicious, fresh food they will be making and eating.

Keep on using the environment to learn :) 

Could you plant with you children? Could you harvest and wash vegetables at home? 

Why not give it a try?!

Well done to our amazing gardeners!

Wow! Well done to Shirley Warren School, Mrs Wilk and the gardening club, you have achieved a silver award in the category of 'Garden for Learning'.

Southampton in Bloom was a whole school project with children from all year groups planting, nurturing and helping to grow their patches.

Year 1 planted lettuces, Year 2 broad beans, Year 3 spinach and green peas, Years 4 and 5 aubergines and a gooseberry stub.

Gardening club expressed their joy: 'We learnt how to look after vegetables by watering them, tieing them up and removing green flies and caterpillars'.

KS1 planted: beans, onions, tomatoes, courgettes, sweet pepper and sowed beetroots, carrots, marigolds, nasturtium and cosmos.

KS2 planted potatoes, strawberries, courgettes, pumpkins, sunflowers, french beans. they also made a herb garden of dill, parsley, coriander and basil.

Who would like to join gardening club next half term?...

Green Council at Aldermoor Farm

Today, all the members of Green Council were excited to go to a farm which is very local to us called Aldermoor Farm.

Farmer Richard welcomed us to the farm.

In this photo we are looking at the safety notice on the back of the sign so that we know all of the hazards of a working farm.

Can you think of any hazards there might be on a working farm?


Richard gave us a tour of his farm.

One thing he really wanted us to see was his "savings account".  Here is is in the second photo.

Can you guess what it is?

It really smelt disgusting as you can see from some of our faces!
 
Richard gave everyone some old spinach plants to feed the chickens with.  We found out that the chickens ate them very quickly!

 Our next job was to plant some flowers in front of the runner beans.  After they were planted we had to water them and also water the lettuces and other vegetables which the sprinkler couldn't reach.

We found out that Aldermoor Farm has a natural spring and Richard has made lots of hoses and clever ways to make the water effective throughout the whole of the farm.

Finally, we got to feed the chickens seed. We found out that Aldermoor Farm is open on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 9am to 5pm.  There is a shop and if you want to feed the chickens, you can pay 20p for a bag of feed.  It would be lovely to see many families from Shirley Warren visit the farm and get involved. 

https://www.aldermoorfarm.org.uk/

RB's picnic in the sunshine!

RB had a lovely afternoon having a class picnic outside on the grass. RB gained all their marbles in the jar and voted for a picnic in the sunshine. We made our own sandwiches and got to spread them by ourselves. We sat next to friends in the big playground and played games using the giant scrunchie and parachute.

Fireworks in Year 4

In Year 4, we have been reading the novel The Firework Maker's Daughter.

As it was the last day of term, we had special permission to show the children some indoor fireworks - outside.  It was very sunny as you can see in the picture, but we thought Snakes Alive was the best one. There was also Disco Inferno, Sizzling Strobes, Flash Harry and Blazing Bengals.  None of them made a noise - they all made light or sparks.  There was a lot of smoke with some of them, so it was good we were outside.

Have you ever seen Indoor Fireworks?
Did you like them?

Pre-nursery Car wash!

This week Pre-nursery have been working together to fix cars in the garage, fill up with petrol and wash the cars in the car wash!

6D Scooter Skills Session

6D won a competition when they recorder the different ways they travel to school over four weeks.

They were rewarded with a session from Bike It Jenny who brought in scooters (and helmets) for the children to try.



First, Jenny tested that the children could stop safely. 

There was a course to scoot round including "roundabouts" (hoops on the ground) and a "zebra crossing" (black and white flag).

The children also had a go at playing musical statues on scooters!
These are great ideas that you could try with a scooter in the summer holidays. If you don't have cones, you could put stones down carefully to scoot around.

Test on Volcanic Eruptions By CA

Today Class 6C did an experiment about volcanoes in our playground, so that we wouldn't cause too much mess in the classroom!

So we took a bottle of Coke and some polos. Then we set everything up, making sure we had a bucket of water for afterwards.

We used the bottle to represent the crust. The liquid coke we used to represent the magma. 

Then we all went a safe distance away from the experiment and our teacher dropped in the polos to create the eruption.

The experiment ended up being successful, although I think next time we would add something so we could drop in the polos quicker, as you can see from the video how we didn't get it in quick enough.

By CA in 6C

Rain in Reception

We have had a great few weeks settling into school life in Reception. The children started full time this week and today we had our first rainy day! We really made the most of it by exploring how the texture of our mud had changed and how we could move down the slide as the water made it super slippy and fun! We are looking forward to the next couple of weeks where we will continue to investigate our new environment.

Green Council Double trip to Lymington Solar Farm and Aldermoor Farm

Today, 11 members of our school Green Council took their waterproofs with them and set off on an adventure.

First we went to Solent Solar Farm where we saw over 9,000 panels which produce a lot of electricity. Cathy, who showed us around, helped to design and build the Solar Farm which has only been running for three years. We saw the cables that joined the panels to the mains - some of them were very heavy!

 In the afternoon, we visited a different kind of farm. Aldermoor Community Farm is a co-operative in Aldermoor Road and farmer Richard had lots of jobs lined up for us to do. First Richard got out his Lego and made a model. Then he put it in the bin! He got it out again, of course, but he was showing us that we can reuse many things and make them into other things. We shouldn't just throw things away without thinking if we can use them for something else. In the photo we are guessing what H has made out of the blocks.

 Here we are collecting plants to make Comfrey Tea. This isn't for people to drink, it's for plants! We had to find the comfrey plant, take off the leaves, break them up and put them in a barrel. After about four weeks they turn into fertiliser for other plants.

Another job we had to do was planting bean seeds. We used Aldermoor farm's special compost and carefully put each seed in each space. We put a lid on them so mice don't come and eat the seeds.

 We went inside the second polytunnel to see the tomato plants and also saw where the cucumbers grow. At the end Richard kindly gave each child a cucumber.

If you visit the farm when it's open you could also buy chicken food for 20p and Richard let us try this activity out. I think you can see from the smiles that everyone enjoyed this activity, even though it started raining heavily.

We are so lucky to have this community farm so near our school and want to thank Richard for another brilliant trip. Even though the weather wasn't good for us - though the plants liked it - all the children loved it and for us teachers it was exciting to see how much Richard and the team have done since we took a group last year.

You can find more about Aldermoor Community Farm online - they often have open days on Bank Holiday Mondays as well as being open Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays 9am-5pm. Maybe you could visit in the summer holidays and feed the chickens.

Year 6's Woodmill adventure

Year 6 have had a brilliant time away on our camping trip to Woodmill. We arrived on Monday evening and quickly set to work putting up our tents - which we all found very exciting!

We then had dinner, played some games and enjoyed marshmallows and songs (and the occasional selfie) around the campfire.

Then it was time for a story and bed... not that we got enough sleep..!

The next day, we were in three groups to do three different activities: archery, climbing and raft-building. Let's just say we got a bit wet on the lake... sorry parents who had to do lots of washing/drying when we got home!

We have some very tired children after all that adventuring! What a great time!