Birstwith CE Primary School

This is our timetable for the half term in Class 2.

We adore PE in Class 2 and our most recent topic, Gymnastics, was a collective favourite! We have lots of children who take part in this as an extra-curricular activity but still challenged themselves each and every session! The children, taught by Miss Erwin and Mr Whitford from Sporting Influence, worked to practise and perform balances and jumps incorporating interesting travelling into their routines. As a fun finale to our learning, we used the bars to extend and challenge our gymnastic skills by balancing on the equipment. We hope you enjoy seeing some of our super talented class! 

As part of our science topic, Forces and Magnets, the children had an incredibly fun time exploring magnets! They set up little tests and experiments in their groups and explored some of the following concepts:

Do magnets work even when not touching? How far does a magnet have to be to attract or repel an object? Which objects/materials are magnetic and why? What forces can we observe when magnets work? 

The children extended on these tests through their homework projects which were super creative. Well done Class 2! 

During PPA time, Mrs Paxton and Mrs Olive have been working with Class 2 to learn how to sew and cross stitch! The children adored using their fine motor skills to accurately sew in a straight line and create a cross stitch. It was a beautifully calm atmosphere and lots of smiley faces when the children saw their beautiful creations!

We had a wonderful time with Sunita from the Indian Experience who spent the day at Birstwith sharing lots of beautiful things from her culture and religion. We enjoyed a very interactive assembly teaching us all about Holi through storytelling, dancing to some funky music and understanding the Hindu prayer.  In the afternoon, we had a go at creating some Rangoli patterns using oil pastels and stencils to make symmetrical patterns, blending colours together and unveiling our creations once they were finished! What a wonderful day, thank you once again to Sunita for visiting Birstwith. 

As part of our Art topic 'The First Artists', we created our own sculptures of Woolly Mammoths using recycled milk bottles, collaged materials including sugar/tissue paper and wool. We used our prior planning to ensure accuracy against the images of the creatures and our techniques we had practised previously. We have included a photo gallery so you can see a selection of our 'herd'!

On Wednesday 28th September 2022, we ventured out with Class 1 to Skipton Castle to support our DT project. We travelled on a lovely coach and walked along the outskirts of the castle, and eventually caught sight of the magnificent castle in front of us! We met our tour guide, Chris, who was great fun and made lots of jokes. We learnt that Skipton in Old English would be 'Sheep Town' as skip = sheep and town = ton. He told us lots of information about the Normans and Vikings then learnt why the castle was built there, and what sort of castle it was (Motte-and-Bailey) as it was built on a hill. After that, we learnt about the architechture of the castle including the names for different parts e.g. drum tower, curtain wall, skirts and drawbridge. Touring the castle was fascinating, exploring the dungeon, kitchen, banqueting hall and more, learning all about the activities of the Clifford family who lived there. After our tour we made observational sketches of the castle, enjoying the beauty of the grounds. 

Thank you to the team at Skipton Castle for being so welcoming and sharing the stories of the past with us! 

Please explore our Curriculum Overviews to see what exciting things we are learning each half term.

Here are the interesting options for the homework projects we enjoy creating each half term.

We have been so excited to use our new chromebooks as we love computing in Class 2! Our science topic this term has been 'plants' and our working scientifically skills have been showcased in lots of ways so far, including planting our own beans, observing the growth of plants, comparing and sorting leaves from deciduous and evergreen trees alongside creating some super homework projects. We decided to use the internet as a secondary source to independently investigate more about plants and follow our own interests using a website packed full of information. We recorded this in our science books in different ways, including creating Top Trumps cards, doing some superb observational drawings and labelling the plants with facts we have collected to record our findings. This was a super investigation session, well done Class 2! 

In RE we have been investigating our key question: 'What can we learn from sacred books?' and having lots of respectful and thoughtful discussion about what we can learn from different religions. We were learning all about the Sefer Torah and Yad, discussing how Jewish people treat their sacred book with respect. We enjoyed watching a video of a child who told us all about how the Torah is stored in the Synagogue, including the direction they store the book which holds importance to their religion. We were amazed by the dedication of the scribes who write on the Torah scroll, as it is handwritten and can take over a year whilst making no mistakes! We thought about what this represents for their sacred book, and why they wouldn't want to make any mistakes. To give some real life context, we created our own scrolls and took care over them when writing to ensure we did not make any mistakes and used our neatest handwriting. We enjoyed making the paper look aged through tea staining, and writing a special message to 'Love Everybody' to send a message. We have added some of our work below, we hope you enjoy looking at it! 

To celebrate the Queen's Platinum Jubilee marking 70 years on the throne, we celebrated in true royal style by dressing up in red, white and blue and wearing our own specially designed crowns! We had a wonderful afternoon of fun with parents and carers joining for the celebrations. We started with a procession around the field to showcase our beautiful crowns and doing our best royal wave, partook in some country dancing, enjoyed a yummy cupcake, had a cake decorating competition and auction then sang some special songs including 'A Life Lived with Grace', 'Platinum Jubilee' and the National Anthem.  We also took part in a treasure hunt around the field to find facts about the Queen, displayed our own bunting and pictures of the Queen we had designed! Happy Platinum Jubilee 

Miss Erwin and Mrs Plant were SO proud of us completing our KS1 SATs with determination, enthusiasm and bundles of positivity! To celebrate, we were surprised with an end of SATs party in the playground complete with ice lollies, sweets and dancing. We were each awarded a trophy for being a 'SATs Superstar' as we had worked so hard, and celebrated each others successes.

We are so lucky to live in such a beautiful village in the Yorkshire Dales, so one sunny afternoon we all adventured out to explore our surroundings. We thought about the local community, visited the award-winning village shop, admired the stunning scenery, talked about the history of the village and even met some local furry residents who joined us on our walk! It was very special to enjoy the outdoors and celebrate our beautiful village. 

As a finale to our Tudor’s topic and focus on William Shakespeare, we were so lucky to visit Harrogate Theatre for a behind the scenes tour and Shakespeare workshop!

Shakespeare workshop:

We looked at who Shakespeare was, what he did and his impact as a significant person from the Tudor era. We discussed the 3 styles of play that he created (tragedies, comedies, histories) and focused on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth. We acted out some Shakespearean insults, dressed up in costumes as fairies and creatures from A Midsummer Night’s Dream then learnt the scene from Macbeth ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’. We also learnt about the Globe Theatre and how Tudor’s would have attended the theatre, including the differences in audience etiquette, rich and poor experiences along with the impact it has had on entertainment today.

Behind the scenes tour:

We were VIP’s and got a behind the scenes look at Harrogate Theatre including learning about set design, stage management, band pit, costumes, audience seating, dressing rooms and the rake of the stage (how it is tilted forwards – very clever!).

We conducted a very fun (and messy!) science experiment to test our knowledge of properties of materials. We were testing the protective properties of some materials by observing how well they protected an egg when it was dropped from a height. We used a variety of materials including:

• Plastic pot
• Felt
• Cotton
• Woven cotton
• Cardboard tube
• Paper towel (1 and 2 layers)
• Paper

We made sure it was a fair test by only changing 1 variable each time (the material) and keeping other things the same (height, using an egg, force of drop). We observed the effect of the drop closely and used descriptive language to describe what had happened (smashed, shattered, splattered, broken in half). Before dropping each egg with a different material, we predicted what would happen using our current knowledge on the properties of materials (thick, stiff, thin, flexible, hard). We then noted down what happened based on each material, and compared materials based on their properties and how well we thought they protected the egg and why. We had so much fun getting messy and experimenting like the fabulous scientists we are! 

We adore reading in Class 2 and love our daily story sessions, reading for pleasure and guided reading to build our comprehension skills. Having a whole day to celebrate reading was a joy for us and we loved exploring the poetry book 'Emotional Menagerie'. Each class at Birstwith focused on an emotion from the book, so in Class 2 Miss Erwin decided to focus on 'Kindness' as this is something we are fantastic at feeling and showing to all! We dressed up as bees and flowers to represent bees spreading pollen to grow flowers like we spread kindness to help others grow For our celebration, we created some poems using similes to compare emotions to different animals and situations, identified how we can physically feel some emotions like embarrassment along with some drama scenes all about how we can be kind to people in different scenarios.

We had a brilliant day with Sunita from the Indian Experience who immersed us in an inspirational day celebrating the Indian culture! We started the day by joining Sunita in the hall to perform some basic Indian dance moves to music then listen to the story of Rama and Sita. We joined in with the story by acting through hand movements and repeating phrases to act as the characters in the story which was lots of fun and so engaging! We then joined Class 1 in the hall and Sunita showed us traditional Indian clothing, including dressing Miss Erwin up in a Sari! We each got to wear a traditional Indian dress and waistcoats along with getting a Bindi sticker to wear on our heads, which we discussed was the appropriate option. Once we were dressed in the intricate, beautiful clothing we participated in some dancing and the styles included Dandiya, Bollywood and Bhangra. We enjoyed this experience so much and were so grateful for Sunita for coming into school!

As part of our Literacy topic focused on the book 'The Bear and The Piano' by David Litchfield, we wanted to write some setting descriptions to help us when we wrote our own version narrative. We decided to go outside to immerse ourselves in a setting to inspire our descriptions using similes, expanded noun phrases and adverbs. We worked in groups to use all our senses (apart from taste!) to describe the setting, then wrote these down and presented them to our class using our clear and confident voices! 

Last week we found a mysterious letter delivered to our classroom with Jingle the Elf...what could it be? We opened it and discovered golden tickets to the Polar Express! Then we heard magical bells and went to explore downstairs in the hall and found the Polar Express! We enjoyed watching a POV of a polar train ride and then listened to the wonderful story 'The Polar Express' by Chris Van Allsburg whilst enjoying a delicious hot chocolate. After that, we spotted a stocking on the tree and wondered what could be inside? It was filled with magical silver sleigh bells just like in the story and we each got given one to show we believe! 
It was a magical experience, and we have enjoyed doing a 'talk 4 writing' rehearsal of a recount using time conjunctions. 

To mark our respect for Remembrance Day in school we decided to contribute to a whole school display where each class created a piece of beautiful art. As our topic has been painting, we decided to paint some poppies to add to the display. However, we have been focusing on sustainability and conservation in our literacy so we decided to make them using recycled bottles! We loved making these and thinking about the significance of the poppy. 

We had a very special visitor come into our class and allow us to investigate some Victorian artefacts of their own which have been passed down through their family! We cleaned the brass and wrote labels for the artefacts using the information we learnt, and enjoyed doing observational drawing of the different objects to decorate their labels. 

We had a very exciting visit from Zoolab linked to our science topic studying living things and their habitats. The visitor brought in some incredible animals and told us some fascinating facts about the animal, the features and their habitats! It was such a brilliant experience and we enjoyed holding or touching the animals carefully and safely. 

Please explore our Curriculum Overviews to see what exciting things we are learning each half term.

Here are the interesting options for the homework projects we enjoy creating each half term.

We adore reading in Class 2 and love our daily story sessions, reading for pleasure and guided reading to build our comprehension skills. Having a whole day to celebrate reading was a joy for us and we loved exploring the poetry book 'Emotional Menagerie'. Each class at Birstwith focused on an emotion from the book, so in Class 2 Miss Erwin decided to focus on 'Kindness' as this is something we are fantastic at feeling and showing to all! We dressed up as bees and flowers to represent bees spreading pollen to grow flowers like we spread kindness to help others grow For our celebration, we created some poems using similes to compare emotions to different animals and situations, identified how we can physically feel some emotions like embarrassment along with some drama scenes all about how we can be kind to people in different scenarios.

We had a brilliant day with Sunita from the Indian Experience who immersed us in an inspirational day celebrating the Indian culture! We started the day by joining Sunita in the hall to perform some basic Indian dance moves to music then listen to the story of Rama and Sita. We joined in with the story by acting through hand movements and repeating phrases to act as the characters in the story which was lots of fun and so engaging! We then joined Class 1 in the hall and Sunita showed us traditional Indian clothing, including dressing Miss Erwin up in a Sari! We each got to wear a traditional Indian dress and waistcoats along with getting a Bindi sticker to wear on our heads, which we discussed was the appropriate option. Once we were dressed in the intricate, beautiful clothing we participated in some dancing and the styles included Dandiya, Bollywood and Bhangra. We enjoyed this experience so much and were so grateful for Sunita for coming into school!

Last week we found a mysterious letter delivered to our classroom with Jingle the Elf...what could it be? We opened it and discovered golden tickets to the Polar Express! Then we heard magical bells and went to explore downstairs in the hall and found the Polar Express! We enjoyed watching a POV of a polar train ride and then listened to the wonderful story 'The Polar Express' by Chris Van Allsburg whilst enjoying a delicious hot chocolate. After that, we spotted a stocking on the tree and wondered what could be inside? It was filled with magical silver sleigh bells just like in the story and we each got given one to show we believe! 
It was a magical experience, and we have enjoyed doing a 'talk 4 writing' rehearsal of a recount using time conjunctions. 

To mark our respect for Remembrance Day in school we decided to contribute to a whole school display where each class created a piece of beautiful art. As our topic has been painting, we decided to paint some poppies to add to the display. However, we have been focusing on sustainability and conservation in our literacy so we decided to make them using recycled bottles! We loved making these and thinking about the significance of the poppy. 

We had a very special visitor come into our class and allow us to investigate some Victorian artefacts of their own which have been passed down through their family! We cleaned the brass and wrote labels for the artefacts using the information we learnt, and enjoyed doing observational drawing of the different objects to decorate their labels. 

We had a very exciting visit from Zoolab linked to our science topic studying living things and their habitats. The visitor brought in some incredible animals and told us some fascinating facts about the animal, the features and their habitats! It was such a brilliant experience and we enjoyed holding or touching the animals carefully and safely. 

Here are the interesting options for the homework projects we enjoy creating each half term.

This is our timetable for the half term in Class 2.

We adore PE in Class 2 and our most recent topic, Gymnastics, was a collective favourite! We have lots of children who take part in this as an extra-curricular activity but still challenged themselves each and every session! The children, taught by Miss Erwin and Mr Whitford from Sporting Influence, worked to practise and perform balances and jumps incorporating interesting travelling into their routines. As a fun finale to our learning, we used the bars to extend and challenge our gymnastic skills by balancing on the equipment. We hope you enjoy seeing some of our super talented class! 

As part of our science topic, Forces and Magnets, the children had an incredibly fun time exploring magnets! They set up little tests and experiments in their groups and explored some of the following concepts:

Do magnets work even when not touching? How far does a magnet have to be to attract or repel an object? Which objects/materials are magnetic and why? What forces can we observe when magnets work? 

The children extended on these tests through their homework projects which were super creative. Well done Class 2! 

During PPA time, Mrs Paxton and Mrs Olive have been working with Class 2 to learn how to sew and cross stitch! The children adored using their fine motor skills to accurately sew in a straight line and create a cross stitch. It was a beautifully calm atmosphere and lots of smiley faces when the children saw their beautiful creations!

We had a wonderful time with Sunita from the Indian Experience who spent the day at Birstwith sharing lots of beautiful things from her culture and religion. We enjoyed a very interactive assembly teaching us all about Holi through storytelling, dancing to some funky music and understanding the Hindu prayer.  In the afternoon, we had a go at creating some Rangoli patterns using oil pastels and stencils to make symmetrical patterns, blending colours together and unveiling our creations once they were finished! What a wonderful day, thank you once again to Sunita for visiting Birstwith. 

As part of our Art topic 'The First Artists', we created our own sculptures of Woolly Mammoths using recycled milk bottles, collaged materials including sugar/tissue paper and wool. We used our prior planning to ensure accuracy against the images of the creatures and our techniques we had practised previously. We have included a photo gallery so you can see a selection of our 'herd'!

On Wednesday 28th September 2022, we ventured out with Class 1 to Skipton Castle to support our DT project. We travelled on a lovely coach and walked along the outskirts of the castle, and eventually caught sight of the magnificent castle in front of us! We met our tour guide, Chris, who was great fun and made lots of jokes. We learnt that Skipton in Old English would be 'Sheep Town' as skip = sheep and town = ton. He told us lots of information about the Normans and Vikings then learnt why the castle was built there, and what sort of castle it was (Motte-and-Bailey) as it was built on a hill. After that, we learnt about the architechture of the castle including the names for different parts e.g. drum tower, curtain wall, skirts and drawbridge. Touring the castle was fascinating, exploring the dungeon, kitchen, banqueting hall and more, learning all about the activities of the Clifford family who lived there. After our tour we made observational sketches of the castle, enjoying the beauty of the grounds. 

Thank you to the team at Skipton Castle for being so welcoming and sharing the stories of the past with us! 

Please explore our Curriculum Overviews to see what exciting things we are learning each half term.

Here are the interesting options for the homework projects we enjoy creating each half term.

We have been so excited to use our new chromebooks as we love computing in Class 2! Our science topic this term has been 'plants' and our working scientifically skills have been showcased in lots of ways so far, including planting our own beans, observing the growth of plants, comparing and sorting leaves from deciduous and evergreen trees alongside creating some super homework projects. We decided to use the internet as a secondary source to independently investigate more about plants and follow our own interests using a website packed full of information. We recorded this in our science books in different ways, including creating Top Trumps cards, doing some superb observational drawings and labelling the plants with facts we have collected to record our findings. This was a super investigation session, well done Class 2! 

In RE we have been investigating our key question: 'What can we learn from sacred books?' and having lots of respectful and thoughtful discussion about what we can learn from different religions. We were learning all about the Sefer Torah and Yad, discussing how Jewish people treat their sacred book with respect. We enjoyed watching a video of a child who told us all about how the Torah is stored in the Synagogue, including the direction they store the book which holds importance to their religion. We were amazed by the dedication of the scribes who write on the Torah scroll, as it is handwritten and can take over a year whilst making no mistakes! We thought about what this represents for their sacred book, and why they wouldn't want to make any mistakes. To give some real life context, we created our own scrolls and took care over them when writing to ensure we did not make any mistakes and used our neatest handwriting. We enjoyed making the paper look aged through tea staining, and writing a special message to 'Love Everybody' to send a message. We have added some of our work below, we hope you enjoy looking at it! 

To celebrate the Queen's Platinum Jubilee marking 70 years on the throne, we celebrated in true royal style by dressing up in red, white and blue and wearing our own specially designed crowns! We had a wonderful afternoon of fun with parents and carers joining for the celebrations. We started with a procession around the field to showcase our beautiful crowns and doing our best royal wave, partook in some country dancing, enjoyed a yummy cupcake, had a cake decorating competition and auction then sang some special songs including 'A Life Lived with Grace', 'Platinum Jubilee' and the National Anthem.  We also took part in a treasure hunt around the field to find facts about the Queen, displayed our own bunting and pictures of the Queen we had designed! Happy Platinum Jubilee 

Miss Erwin and Mrs Plant were SO proud of us completing our KS1 SATs with determination, enthusiasm and bundles of positivity! To celebrate, we were surprised with an end of SATs party in the playground complete with ice lollies, sweets and dancing. We were each awarded a trophy for being a 'SATs Superstar' as we had worked so hard, and celebrated each others successes.

We are so lucky to live in such a beautiful village in the Yorkshire Dales, so one sunny afternoon we all adventured out to explore our surroundings. We thought about the local community, visited the award-winning village shop, admired the stunning scenery, talked about the history of the village and even met some local furry residents who joined us on our walk! It was very special to enjoy the outdoors and celebrate our beautiful village. 

As a finale to our Tudor’s topic and focus on William Shakespeare, we were so lucky to visit Harrogate Theatre for a behind the scenes tour and Shakespeare workshop!

Shakespeare workshop:

We looked at who Shakespeare was, what he did and his impact as a significant person from the Tudor era. We discussed the 3 styles of play that he created (tragedies, comedies, histories) and focused on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth. We acted out some Shakespearean insults, dressed up in costumes as fairies and creatures from A Midsummer Night’s Dream then learnt the scene from Macbeth ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’. We also learnt about the Globe Theatre and how Tudor’s would have attended the theatre, including the differences in audience etiquette, rich and poor experiences along with the impact it has had on entertainment today.

Behind the scenes tour:

We were VIP’s and got a behind the scenes look at Harrogate Theatre including learning about set design, stage management, band pit, costumes, audience seating, dressing rooms and the rake of the stage (how it is tilted forwards – very clever!).

We conducted a very fun (and messy!) science experiment to test our knowledge of properties of materials. We were testing the protective properties of some materials by observing how well they protected an egg when it was dropped from a height. We used a variety of materials including:

• Plastic pot
• Felt
• Cotton
• Woven cotton
• Cardboard tube
• Paper towel (1 and 2 layers)
• Paper

We made sure it was a fair test by only changing 1 variable each time (the material) and keeping other things the same (height, using an egg, force of drop). We observed the effect of the drop closely and used descriptive language to describe what had happened (smashed, shattered, splattered, broken in half). Before dropping each egg with a different material, we predicted what would happen using our current knowledge on the properties of materials (thick, stiff, thin, flexible, hard). We then noted down what happened based on each material, and compared materials based on their properties and how well we thought they protected the egg and why. We had so much fun getting messy and experimenting like the fabulous scientists we are! 

We adore reading in Class 2 and love our daily story sessions, reading for pleasure and guided reading to build our comprehension skills. Having a whole day to celebrate reading was a joy for us and we loved exploring the poetry book 'Emotional Menagerie'. Each class at Birstwith focused on an emotion from the book, so in Class 2 Miss Erwin decided to focus on 'Kindness' as this is something we are fantastic at feeling and showing to all! We dressed up as bees and flowers to represent bees spreading pollen to grow flowers like we spread kindness to help others grow For our celebration, we created some poems using similes to compare emotions to different animals and situations, identified how we can physically feel some emotions like embarrassment along with some drama scenes all about how we can be kind to people in different scenarios.

We had a brilliant day with Sunita from the Indian Experience who immersed us in an inspirational day celebrating the Indian culture! We started the day by joining Sunita in the hall to perform some basic Indian dance moves to music then listen to the story of Rama and Sita. We joined in with the story by acting through hand movements and repeating phrases to act as the characters in the story which was lots of fun and so engaging! We then joined Class 1 in the hall and Sunita showed us traditional Indian clothing, including dressing Miss Erwin up in a Sari! We each got to wear a traditional Indian dress and waistcoats along with getting a Bindi sticker to wear on our heads, which we discussed was the appropriate option. Once we were dressed in the intricate, beautiful clothing we participated in some dancing and the styles included Dandiya, Bollywood and Bhangra. We enjoyed this experience so much and were so grateful for Sunita for coming into school!

As part of our Literacy topic focused on the book 'The Bear and The Piano' by David Litchfield, we wanted to write some setting descriptions to help us when we wrote our own version narrative. We decided to go outside to immerse ourselves in a setting to inspire our descriptions using similes, expanded noun phrases and adverbs. We worked in groups to use all our senses (apart from taste!) to describe the setting, then wrote these down and presented them to our class using our clear and confident voices! 

Last week we found a mysterious letter delivered to our classroom with Jingle the Elf...what could it be? We opened it and discovered golden tickets to the Polar Express! Then we heard magical bells and went to explore downstairs in the hall and found the Polar Express! We enjoyed watching a POV of a polar train ride and then listened to the wonderful story 'The Polar Express' by Chris Van Allsburg whilst enjoying a delicious hot chocolate. After that, we spotted a stocking on the tree and wondered what could be inside? It was filled with magical silver sleigh bells just like in the story and we each got given one to show we believe! 
It was a magical experience, and we have enjoyed doing a 'talk 4 writing' rehearsal of a recount using time conjunctions. 

To mark our respect for Remembrance Day in school we decided to contribute to a whole school display where each class created a piece of beautiful art. As our topic has been painting, we decided to paint some poppies to add to the display. However, we have been focusing on sustainability and conservation in our literacy so we decided to make them using recycled bottles! We loved making these and thinking about the significance of the poppy. 

We had a very special visitor come into our class and allow us to investigate some Victorian artefacts of their own which have been passed down through their family! We cleaned the brass and wrote labels for the artefacts using the information we learnt, and enjoyed doing observational drawing of the different objects to decorate their labels. 

We had a very exciting visit from Zoolab linked to our science topic studying living things and their habitats. The visitor brought in some incredible animals and told us some fascinating facts about the animal, the features and their habitats! It was such a brilliant experience and we enjoyed holding or touching the animals carefully and safely. 

Please explore our Curriculum Overviews to see what exciting things we are learning each half term.

Here are the interesting options for the homework projects we enjoy creating each half term.

We adore reading in Class 2 and love our daily story sessions, reading for pleasure and guided reading to build our comprehension skills. Having a whole day to celebrate reading was a joy for us and we loved exploring the poetry book 'Emotional Menagerie'. Each class at Birstwith focused on an emotion from the book, so in Class 2 Miss Erwin decided to focus on 'Kindness' as this is something we are fantastic at feeling and showing to all! We dressed up as bees and flowers to represent bees spreading pollen to grow flowers like we spread kindness to help others grow For our celebration, we created some poems using similes to compare emotions to different animals and situations, identified how we can physically feel some emotions like embarrassment along with some drama scenes all about how we can be kind to people in different scenarios.

We had a brilliant day with Sunita from the Indian Experience who immersed us in an inspirational day celebrating the Indian culture! We started the day by joining Sunita in the hall to perform some basic Indian dance moves to music then listen to the story of Rama and Sita. We joined in with the story by acting through hand movements and repeating phrases to act as the characters in the story which was lots of fun and so engaging! We then joined Class 1 in the hall and Sunita showed us traditional Indian clothing, including dressing Miss Erwin up in a Sari! We each got to wear a traditional Indian dress and waistcoats along with getting a Bindi sticker to wear on our heads, which we discussed was the appropriate option. Once we were dressed in the intricate, beautiful clothing we participated in some dancing and the styles included Dandiya, Bollywood and Bhangra. We enjoyed this experience so much and were so grateful for Sunita for coming into school!

Last week we found a mysterious letter delivered to our classroom with Jingle the Elf...what could it be? We opened it and discovered golden tickets to the Polar Express! Then we heard magical bells and went to explore downstairs in the hall and found the Polar Express! We enjoyed watching a POV of a polar train ride and then listened to the wonderful story 'The Polar Express' by Chris Van Allsburg whilst enjoying a delicious hot chocolate. After that, we spotted a stocking on the tree and wondered what could be inside? It was filled with magical silver sleigh bells just like in the story and we each got given one to show we believe! 
It was a magical experience, and we have enjoyed doing a 'talk 4 writing' rehearsal of a recount using time conjunctions. 

To mark our respect for Remembrance Day in school we decided to contribute to a whole school display where each class created a piece of beautiful art. As our topic has been painting, we decided to paint some poppies to add to the display. However, we have been focusing on sustainability and conservation in our literacy so we decided to make them using recycled bottles! We loved making these and thinking about the significance of the poppy. 

We had a very special visitor come into our class and allow us to investigate some Victorian artefacts of their own which have been passed down through their family! We cleaned the brass and wrote labels for the artefacts using the information we learnt, and enjoyed doing observational drawing of the different objects to decorate their labels. 

We had a very exciting visit from Zoolab linked to our science topic studying living things and their habitats. The visitor brought in some incredible animals and told us some fascinating facts about the animal, the features and their habitats! It was such a brilliant experience and we enjoyed holding or touching the animals carefully and safely. 

Here are the interesting options for the homework projects we enjoy creating each half term.

This is our timetable for the half term in Class 2.

We adore PE in Class 2 and our most recent topic, Gymnastics, was a collective favourite! We have lots of children who take part in this as an extra-curricular activity but still challenged themselves each and every session! The children, taught by Miss Erwin and Mr Whitford from Sporting Influence, worked to practise and perform balances and jumps incorporating interesting travelling into their routines. As a fun finale to our learning, we used the bars to extend and challenge our gymnastic skills by balancing on the equipment. We hope you enjoy seeing some of our super talented class! 

As part of our science topic, Forces and Magnets, the children had an incredibly fun time exploring magnets! They set up little tests and experiments in their groups and explored some of the following concepts:

Do magnets work even when not touching? How far does a magnet have to be to attract or repel an object? Which objects/materials are magnetic and why? What forces can we observe when magnets work? 

The children extended on these tests through their homework projects which were super creative. Well done Class 2! 

During PPA time, Mrs Paxton and Mrs Olive have been working with Class 2 to learn how to sew and cross stitch! The children adored using their fine motor skills to accurately sew in a straight line and create a cross stitch. It was a beautifully calm atmosphere and lots of smiley faces when the children saw their beautiful creations!

We had a wonderful time with Sunita from the Indian Experience who spent the day at Birstwith sharing lots of beautiful things from her culture and religion. We enjoyed a very interactive assembly teaching us all about Holi through storytelling, dancing to some funky music and understanding the Hindu prayer.  In the afternoon, we had a go at creating some Rangoli patterns using oil pastels and stencils to make symmetrical patterns, blending colours together and unveiling our creations once they were finished! What a wonderful day, thank you once again to Sunita for visiting Birstwith. 

As part of our Art topic 'The First Artists', we created our own sculptures of Woolly Mammoths using recycled milk bottles, collaged materials including sugar/tissue paper and wool. We used our prior planning to ensure accuracy against the images of the creatures and our techniques we had practised previously. We have included a photo gallery so you can see a selection of our 'herd'!

On Wednesday 28th September 2022, we ventured out with Class 1 to Skipton Castle to support our DT project. We travelled on a lovely coach and walked along the outskirts of the castle, and eventually caught sight of the magnificent castle in front of us! We met our tour guide, Chris, who was great fun and made lots of jokes. We learnt that Skipton in Old English would be 'Sheep Town' as skip = sheep and town = ton. He told us lots of information about the Normans and Vikings then learnt why the castle was built there, and what sort of castle it was (Motte-and-Bailey) as it was built on a hill. After that, we learnt about the architechture of the castle including the names for different parts e.g. drum tower, curtain wall, skirts and drawbridge. Touring the castle was fascinating, exploring the dungeon, kitchen, banqueting hall and more, learning all about the activities of the Clifford family who lived there. After our tour we made observational sketches of the castle, enjoying the beauty of the grounds. 

Thank you to the team at Skipton Castle for being so welcoming and sharing the stories of the past with us! 

Please explore our Curriculum Overviews to see what exciting things we are learning each half term.

Here are the interesting options for the homework projects we enjoy creating each half term.

We have been so excited to use our new chromebooks as we love computing in Class 2! Our science topic this term has been 'plants' and our working scientifically skills have been showcased in lots of ways so far, including planting our own beans, observing the growth of plants, comparing and sorting leaves from deciduous and evergreen trees alongside creating some super homework projects. We decided to use the internet as a secondary source to independently investigate more about plants and follow our own interests using a website packed full of information. We recorded this in our science books in different ways, including creating Top Trumps cards, doing some superb observational drawings and labelling the plants with facts we have collected to record our findings. This was a super investigation session, well done Class 2! 

In RE we have been investigating our key question: 'What can we learn from sacred books?' and having lots of respectful and thoughtful discussion about what we can learn from different religions. We were learning all about the Sefer Torah and Yad, discussing how Jewish people treat their sacred book with respect. We enjoyed watching a video of a child who told us all about how the Torah is stored in the Synagogue, including the direction they store the book which holds importance to their religion. We were amazed by the dedication of the scribes who write on the Torah scroll, as it is handwritten and can take over a year whilst making no mistakes! We thought about what this represents for their sacred book, and why they wouldn't want to make any mistakes. To give some real life context, we created our own scrolls and took care over them when writing to ensure we did not make any mistakes and used our neatest handwriting. We enjoyed making the paper look aged through tea staining, and writing a special message to 'Love Everybody' to send a message. We have added some of our work below, we hope you enjoy looking at it! 

To celebrate the Queen's Platinum Jubilee marking 70 years on the throne, we celebrated in true royal style by dressing up in red, white and blue and wearing our own specially designed crowns! We had a wonderful afternoon of fun with parents and carers joining for the celebrations. We started with a procession around the field to showcase our beautiful crowns and doing our best royal wave, partook in some country dancing, enjoyed a yummy cupcake, had a cake decorating competition and auction then sang some special songs including 'A Life Lived with Grace', 'Platinum Jubilee' and the National Anthem.  We also took part in a treasure hunt around the field to find facts about the Queen, displayed our own bunting and pictures of the Queen we had designed! Happy Platinum Jubilee 

Miss Erwin and Mrs Plant were SO proud of us completing our KS1 SATs with determination, enthusiasm and bundles of positivity! To celebrate, we were surprised with an end of SATs party in the playground complete with ice lollies, sweets and dancing. We were each awarded a trophy for being a 'SATs Superstar' as we had worked so hard, and celebrated each others successes.

We are so lucky to live in such a beautiful village in the Yorkshire Dales, so one sunny afternoon we all adventured out to explore our surroundings. We thought about the local community, visited the award-winning village shop, admired the stunning scenery, talked about the history of the village and even met some local furry residents who joined us on our walk! It was very special to enjoy the outdoors and celebrate our beautiful village. 

As a finale to our Tudor’s topic and focus on William Shakespeare, we were so lucky to visit Harrogate Theatre for a behind the scenes tour and Shakespeare workshop!

Shakespeare workshop:

We looked at who Shakespeare was, what he did and his impact as a significant person from the Tudor era. We discussed the 3 styles of play that he created (tragedies, comedies, histories) and focused on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth. We acted out some Shakespearean insults, dressed up in costumes as fairies and creatures from A Midsummer Night’s Dream then learnt the scene from Macbeth ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’. We also learnt about the Globe Theatre and how Tudor’s would have attended the theatre, including the differences in audience etiquette, rich and poor experiences along with the impact it has had on entertainment today.

Behind the scenes tour:

We were VIP’s and got a behind the scenes look at Harrogate Theatre including learning about set design, stage management, band pit, costumes, audience seating, dressing rooms and the rake of the stage (how it is tilted forwards – very clever!).

We conducted a very fun (and messy!) science experiment to test our knowledge of properties of materials. We were testing the protective properties of some materials by observing how well they protected an egg when it was dropped from a height. We used a variety of materials including:

• Plastic pot
• Felt
• Cotton
• Woven cotton
• Cardboard tube
• Paper towel (1 and 2 layers)
• Paper

We made sure it was a fair test by only changing 1 variable each time (the material) and keeping other things the same (height, using an egg, force of drop). We observed the effect of the drop closely and used descriptive language to describe what had happened (smashed, shattered, splattered, broken in half). Before dropping each egg with a different material, we predicted what would happen using our current knowledge on the properties of materials (thick, stiff, thin, flexible, hard). We then noted down what happened based on each material, and compared materials based on their properties and how well we thought they protected the egg and why. We had so much fun getting messy and experimenting like the fabulous scientists we are! 

We adore reading in Class 2 and love our daily story sessions, reading for pleasure and guided reading to build our comprehension skills. Having a whole day to celebrate reading was a joy for us and we loved exploring the poetry book 'Emotional Menagerie'. Each class at Birstwith focused on an emotion from the book, so in Class 2 Miss Erwin decided to focus on 'Kindness' as this is something we are fantastic at feeling and showing to all! We dressed up as bees and flowers to represent bees spreading pollen to grow flowers like we spread kindness to help others grow For our celebration, we created some poems using similes to compare emotions to different animals and situations, identified how we can physically feel some emotions like embarrassment along with some drama scenes all about how we can be kind to people in different scenarios.

We had a brilliant day with Sunita from the Indian Experience who immersed us in an inspirational day celebrating the Indian culture! We started the day by joining Sunita in the hall to perform some basic Indian dance moves to music then listen to the story of Rama and Sita. We joined in with the story by acting through hand movements and repeating phrases to act as the characters in the story which was lots of fun and so engaging! We then joined Class 1 in the hall and Sunita showed us traditional Indian clothing, including dressing Miss Erwin up in a Sari! We each got to wear a traditional Indian dress and waistcoats along with getting a Bindi sticker to wear on our heads, which we discussed was the appropriate option. Once we were dressed in the intricate, beautiful clothing we participated in some dancing and the styles included Dandiya, Bollywood and Bhangra. We enjoyed this experience so much and were so grateful for Sunita for coming into school!

As part of our Literacy topic focused on the book 'The Bear and The Piano' by David Litchfield, we wanted to write some setting descriptions to help us when we wrote our own version narrative. We decided to go outside to immerse ourselves in a setting to inspire our descriptions using similes, expanded noun phrases and adverbs. We worked in groups to use all our senses (apart from taste!) to describe the setting, then wrote these down and presented them to our class using our clear and confident voices! 

Last week we found a mysterious letter delivered to our classroom with Jingle the Elf...what could it be? We opened it and discovered golden tickets to the Polar Express! Then we heard magical bells and went to explore downstairs in the hall and found the Polar Express! We enjoyed watching a POV of a polar train ride and then listened to the wonderful story 'The Polar Express' by Chris Van Allsburg whilst enjoying a delicious hot chocolate. After that, we spotted a stocking on the tree and wondered what could be inside? It was filled with magical silver sleigh bells just like in the story and we each got given one to show we believe! 
It was a magical experience, and we have enjoyed doing a 'talk 4 writing' rehearsal of a recount using time conjunctions. 

To mark our respect for Remembrance Day in school we decided to contribute to a whole school display where each class created a piece of beautiful art. As our topic has been painting, we decided to paint some poppies to add to the display. However, we have been focusing on sustainability and conservation in our literacy so we decided to make them using recycled bottles! We loved making these and thinking about the significance of the poppy. 

We had a very special visitor come into our class and allow us to investigate some Victorian artefacts of their own which have been passed down through their family! We cleaned the brass and wrote labels for the artefacts using the information we learnt, and enjoyed doing observational drawing of the different objects to decorate their labels. 

We had a very exciting visit from Zoolab linked to our science topic studying living things and their habitats. The visitor brought in some incredible animals and told us some fascinating facts about the animal, the features and their habitats! It was such a brilliant experience and we enjoyed holding or touching the animals carefully and safely. 

Please explore our Curriculum Overviews to see what exciting things we are learning each half term.

Here are the interesting options for the homework projects we enjoy creating each half term.

We adore reading in Class 2 and love our daily story sessions, reading for pleasure and guided reading to build our comprehension skills. Having a whole day to celebrate reading was a joy for us and we loved exploring the poetry book 'Emotional Menagerie'. Each class at Birstwith focused on an emotion from the book, so in Class 2 Miss Erwin decided to focus on 'Kindness' as this is something we are fantastic at feeling and showing to all! We dressed up as bees and flowers to represent bees spreading pollen to grow flowers like we spread kindness to help others grow For our celebration, we created some poems using similes to compare emotions to different animals and situations, identified how we can physically feel some emotions like embarrassment along with some drama scenes all about how we can be kind to people in different scenarios.

We had a brilliant day with Sunita from the Indian Experience who immersed us in an inspirational day celebrating the Indian culture! We started the day by joining Sunita in the hall to perform some basic Indian dance moves to music then listen to the story of Rama and Sita. We joined in with the story by acting through hand movements and repeating phrases to act as the characters in the story which was lots of fun and so engaging! We then joined Class 1 in the hall and Sunita showed us traditional Indian clothing, including dressing Miss Erwin up in a Sari! We each got to wear a traditional Indian dress and waistcoats along with getting a Bindi sticker to wear on our heads, which we discussed was the appropriate option. Once we were dressed in the intricate, beautiful clothing we participated in some dancing and the styles included Dandiya, Bollywood and Bhangra. We enjoyed this experience so much and were so grateful for Sunita for coming into school!

Last week we found a mysterious letter delivered to our classroom with Jingle the Elf...what could it be? We opened it and discovered golden tickets to the Polar Express! Then we heard magical bells and went to explore downstairs in the hall and found the Polar Express! We enjoyed watching a POV of a polar train ride and then listened to the wonderful story 'The Polar Express' by Chris Van Allsburg whilst enjoying a delicious hot chocolate. After that, we spotted a stocking on the tree and wondered what could be inside? It was filled with magical silver sleigh bells just like in the story and we each got given one to show we believe! 
It was a magical experience, and we have enjoyed doing a 'talk 4 writing' rehearsal of a recount using time conjunctions. 

To mark our respect for Remembrance Day in school we decided to contribute to a whole school display where each class created a piece of beautiful art. As our topic has been painting, we decided to paint some poppies to add to the display. However, we have been focusing on sustainability and conservation in our literacy so we decided to make them using recycled bottles! We loved making these and thinking about the significance of the poppy. 

We had a very special visitor come into our class and allow us to investigate some Victorian artefacts of their own which have been passed down through their family! We cleaned the brass and wrote labels for the artefacts using the information we learnt, and enjoyed doing observational drawing of the different objects to decorate their labels. 

We had a very exciting visit from Zoolab linked to our science topic studying living things and their habitats. The visitor brought in some incredible animals and told us some fascinating facts about the animal, the features and their habitats! It was such a brilliant experience and we enjoyed holding or touching the animals carefully and safely. 

Here are the interesting options for the homework projects we enjoy creating each half term.

This is our timetable for the half term in Class 2.

We adore PE in Class 2 and our most recent topic, Gymnastics, was a collective favourite! We have lots of children who take part in this as an extra-curricular activity but still challenged themselves each and every session! The children, taught by Miss Erwin and Mr Whitford from Sporting Influence, worked to practise and perform balances and jumps incorporating interesting travelling into their routines. As a fun finale to our learning, we used the bars to extend and challenge our gymnastic skills by balancing on the equipment. We hope you enjoy seeing some of our super talented class! 

As part of our science topic, Forces and Magnets, the children had an incredibly fun time exploring magnets! They set up little tests and experiments in their groups and explored some of the following concepts:

Do magnets work even when not touching? How far does a magnet have to be to attract or repel an object? Which objects/materials are magnetic and why? What forces can we observe when magnets work? 

The children extended on these tests through their homework projects which were super creative. Well done Class 2! 

During PPA time, Mrs Paxton and Mrs Olive have been working with Class 2 to learn how to sew and cross stitch! The children adored using their fine motor skills to accurately sew in a straight line and create a cross stitch. It was a beautifully calm atmosphere and lots of smiley faces when the children saw their beautiful creations!

We had a wonderful time with Sunita from the Indian Experience who spent the day at Birstwith sharing lots of beautiful things from her culture and religion. We enjoyed a very interactive assembly teaching us all about Holi through storytelling, dancing to some funky music and understanding the Hindu prayer.  In the afternoon, we had a go at creating some Rangoli patterns using oil pastels and stencils to make symmetrical patterns, blending colours together and unveiling our creations once they were finished! What a wonderful day, thank you once again to Sunita for visiting Birstwith. 

As part of our Art topic 'The First Artists', we created our own sculptures of Woolly Mammoths using recycled milk bottles, collaged materials including sugar/tissue paper and wool. We used our prior planning to ensure accuracy against the images of the creatures and our techniques we had practised previously. We have included a photo gallery so you can see a selection of our 'herd'!

On Wednesday 28th September 2022, we ventured out with Class 1 to Skipton Castle to support our DT project. We travelled on a lovely coach and walked along the outskirts of the castle, and eventually caught sight of the magnificent castle in front of us! We met our tour guide, Chris, who was great fun and made lots of jokes. We learnt that Skipton in Old English would be 'Sheep Town' as skip = sheep and town = ton. He told us lots of information about the Normans and Vikings then learnt why the castle was built there, and what sort of castle it was (Motte-and-Bailey) as it was built on a hill. After that, we learnt about the architechture of the castle including the names for different parts e.g. drum tower, curtain wall, skirts and drawbridge. Touring the castle was fascinating, exploring the dungeon, kitchen, banqueting hall and more, learning all about the activities of the Clifford family who lived there. After our tour we made observational sketches of the castle, enjoying the beauty of the grounds. 

Thank you to the team at Skipton Castle for being so welcoming and sharing the stories of the past with us! 

Please explore our Curriculum Overviews to see what exciting things we are learning each half term.

Here are the interesting options for the homework projects we enjoy creating each half term.

We have been so excited to use our new chromebooks as we love computing in Class 2! Our science topic this term has been 'plants' and our working scientifically skills have been showcased in lots of ways so far, including planting our own beans, observing the growth of plants, comparing and sorting leaves from deciduous and evergreen trees alongside creating some super homework projects. We decided to use the internet as a secondary source to independently investigate more about plants and follow our own interests using a website packed full of information. We recorded this in our science books in different ways, including creating Top Trumps cards, doing some superb observational drawings and labelling the plants with facts we have collected to record our findings. This was a super investigation session, well done Class 2! 

In RE we have been investigating our key question: 'What can we learn from sacred books?' and having lots of respectful and thoughtful discussion about what we can learn from different religions. We were learning all about the Sefer Torah and Yad, discussing how Jewish people treat their sacred book with respect. We enjoyed watching a video of a child who told us all about how the Torah is stored in the Synagogue, including the direction they store the book which holds importance to their religion. We were amazed by the dedication of the scribes who write on the Torah scroll, as it is handwritten and can take over a year whilst making no mistakes! We thought about what this represents for their sacred book, and why they wouldn't want to make any mistakes. To give some real life context, we created our own scrolls and took care over them when writing to ensure we did not make any mistakes and used our neatest handwriting. We enjoyed making the paper look aged through tea staining, and writing a special message to 'Love Everybody' to send a message. We have added some of our work below, we hope you enjoy looking at it! 

To celebrate the Queen's Platinum Jubilee marking 70 years on the throne, we celebrated in true royal style by dressing up in red, white and blue and wearing our own specially designed crowns! We had a wonderful afternoon of fun with parents and carers joining for the celebrations. We started with a procession around the field to showcase our beautiful crowns and doing our best royal wave, partook in some country dancing, enjoyed a yummy cupcake, had a cake decorating competition and auction then sang some special songs including 'A Life Lived with Grace', 'Platinum Jubilee' and the National Anthem.  We also took part in a treasure hunt around the field to find facts about the Queen, displayed our own bunting and pictures of the Queen we had designed! Happy Platinum Jubilee 

Miss Erwin and Mrs Plant were SO proud of us completing our KS1 SATs with determination, enthusiasm and bundles of positivity! To celebrate, we were surprised with an end of SATs party in the playground complete with ice lollies, sweets and dancing. We were each awarded a trophy for being a 'SATs Superstar' as we had worked so hard, and celebrated each others successes.

We are so lucky to live in such a beautiful village in the Yorkshire Dales, so one sunny afternoon we all adventured out to explore our surroundings. We thought about the local community, visited the award-winning village shop, admired the stunning scenery, talked about the history of the village and even met some local furry residents who joined us on our walk! It was very special to enjoy the outdoors and celebrate our beautiful village. 

As a finale to our Tudor’s topic and focus on William Shakespeare, we were so lucky to visit Harrogate Theatre for a behind the scenes tour and Shakespeare workshop!

Shakespeare workshop:

We looked at who Shakespeare was, what he did and his impact as a significant person from the Tudor era. We discussed the 3 styles of play that he created (tragedies, comedies, histories) and focused on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth. We acted out some Shakespearean insults, dressed up in costumes as fairies and creatures from A Midsummer Night’s Dream then learnt the scene from Macbeth ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’. We also learnt about the Globe Theatre and how Tudor’s would have attended the theatre, including the differences in audience etiquette, rich and poor experiences along with the impact it has had on entertainment today.

Behind the scenes tour:

We were VIP’s and got a behind the scenes look at Harrogate Theatre including learning about set design, stage management, band pit, costumes, audience seating, dressing rooms and the rake of the stage (how it is tilted forwards – very clever!).

We conducted a very fun (and messy!) science experiment to test our knowledge of properties of materials. We were testing the protective properties of some materials by observing how well they protected an egg when it was dropped from a height. We used a variety of materials including:

• Plastic pot
• Felt
• Cotton
• Woven cotton
• Cardboard tube
• Paper towel (1 and 2 layers)
• Paper

We made sure it was a fair test by only changing 1 variable each time (the material) and keeping other things the same (height, using an egg, force of drop). We observed the effect of the drop closely and used descriptive language to describe what had happened (smashed, shattered, splattered, broken in half). Before dropping each egg with a different material, we predicted what would happen using our current knowledge on the properties of materials (thick, stiff, thin, flexible, hard). We then noted down what happened based on each material, and compared materials based on their properties and how well we thought they protected the egg and why. We had so much fun getting messy and experimenting like the fabulous scientists we are! 

We adore reading in Class 2 and love our daily story sessions, reading for pleasure and guided reading to build our comprehension skills. Having a whole day to celebrate reading was a joy for us and we loved exploring the poetry book 'Emotional Menagerie'. Each class at Birstwith focused on an emotion from the book, so in Class 2 Miss Erwin decided to focus on 'Kindness' as this is something we are fantastic at feeling and showing to all! We dressed up as bees and flowers to represent bees spreading pollen to grow flowers like we spread kindness to help others grow For our celebration, we created some poems using similes to compare emotions to different animals and situations, identified how we can physically feel some emotions like embarrassment along with some drama scenes all about how we can be kind to people in different scenarios.

We had a brilliant day with Sunita from the Indian Experience who immersed us in an inspirational day celebrating the Indian culture! We started the day by joining Sunita in the hall to perform some basic Indian dance moves to music then listen to the story of Rama and Sita. We joined in with the story by acting through hand movements and repeating phrases to act as the characters in the story which was lots of fun and so engaging! We then joined Class 1 in the hall and Sunita showed us traditional Indian clothing, including dressing Miss Erwin up in a Sari! We each got to wear a traditional Indian dress and waistcoats along with getting a Bindi sticker to wear on our heads, which we discussed was the appropriate option. Once we were dressed in the intricate, beautiful clothing we participated in some dancing and the styles included Dandiya, Bollywood and Bhangra. We enjoyed this experience so much and were so grateful for Sunita for coming into school!

As part of our Literacy topic focused on the book 'The Bear and The Piano' by David Litchfield, we wanted to write some setting descriptions to help us when we wrote our own version narrative. We decided to go outside to immerse ourselves in a setting to inspire our descriptions using similes, expanded noun phrases and adverbs. We worked in groups to use all our senses (apart from taste!) to describe the setting, then wrote these down and presented them to our class using our clear and confident voices! 

Last week we found a mysterious letter delivered to our classroom with Jingle the Elf...what could it be? We opened it and discovered golden tickets to the Polar Express! Then we heard magical bells and went to explore downstairs in the hall and found the Polar Express! We enjoyed watching a POV of a polar train ride and then listened to the wonderful story 'The Polar Express' by Chris Van Allsburg whilst enjoying a delicious hot chocolate. After that, we spotted a stocking on the tree and wondered what could be inside? It was filled with magical silver sleigh bells just like in the story and we each got given one to show we believe! 
It was a magical experience, and we have enjoyed doing a 'talk 4 writing' rehearsal of a recount using time conjunctions. 

To mark our respect for Remembrance Day in school we decided to contribute to a whole school display where each class created a piece of beautiful art. As our topic has been painting, we decided to paint some poppies to add to the display. However, we have been focusing on sustainability and conservation in our literacy so we decided to make them using recycled bottles! We loved making these and thinking about the significance of the poppy. 

We had a very special visitor come into our class and allow us to investigate some Victorian artefacts of their own which have been passed down through their family! We cleaned the brass and wrote labels for the artefacts using the information we learnt, and enjoyed doing observational drawing of the different objects to decorate their labels. 

We had a very exciting visit from Zoolab linked to our science topic studying living things and their habitats. The visitor brought in some incredible animals and told us some fascinating facts about the animal, the features and their habitats! It was such a brilliant experience and we enjoyed holding or touching the animals carefully and safely. 

Please explore our Curriculum Overviews to see what exciting things we are learning each half term.

Here are the interesting options for the homework projects we enjoy creating each half term.

We adore reading in Class 2 and love our daily story sessions, reading for pleasure and guided reading to build our comprehension skills. Having a whole day to celebrate reading was a joy for us and we loved exploring the poetry book 'Emotional Menagerie'. Each class at Birstwith focused on an emotion from the book, so in Class 2 Miss Erwin decided to focus on 'Kindness' as this is something we are fantastic at feeling and showing to all! We dressed up as bees and flowers to represent bees spreading pollen to grow flowers like we spread kindness to help others grow For our celebration, we created some poems using similes to compare emotions to different animals and situations, identified how we can physically feel some emotions like embarrassment along with some drama scenes all about how we can be kind to people in different scenarios.

We had a brilliant day with Sunita from the Indian Experience who immersed us in an inspirational day celebrating the Indian culture! We started the day by joining Sunita in the hall to perform some basic Indian dance moves to music then listen to the story of Rama and Sita. We joined in with the story by acting through hand movements and repeating phrases to act as the characters in the story which was lots of fun and so engaging! We then joined Class 1 in the hall and Sunita showed us traditional Indian clothing, including dressing Miss Erwin up in a Sari! We each got to wear a traditional Indian dress and waistcoats along with getting a Bindi sticker to wear on our heads, which we discussed was the appropriate option. Once we were dressed in the intricate, beautiful clothing we participated in some dancing and the styles included Dandiya, Bollywood and Bhangra. We enjoyed this experience so much and were so grateful for Sunita for coming into school!

Last week we found a mysterious letter delivered to our classroom with Jingle the Elf...what could it be? We opened it and discovered golden tickets to the Polar Express! Then we heard magical bells and went to explore downstairs in the hall and found the Polar Express! We enjoyed watching a POV of a polar train ride and then listened to the wonderful story 'The Polar Express' by Chris Van Allsburg whilst enjoying a delicious hot chocolate. After that, we spotted a stocking on the tree and wondered what could be inside? It was filled with magical silver sleigh bells just like in the story and we each got given one to show we believe! 
It was a magical experience, and we have enjoyed doing a 'talk 4 writing' rehearsal of a recount using time conjunctions. 

To mark our respect for Remembrance Day in school we decided to contribute to a whole school display where each class created a piece of beautiful art. As our topic has been painting, we decided to paint some poppies to add to the display. However, we have been focusing on sustainability and conservation in our literacy so we decided to make them using recycled bottles! We loved making these and thinking about the significance of the poppy. 

We had a very special visitor come into our class and allow us to investigate some Victorian artefacts of their own which have been passed down through their family! We cleaned the brass and wrote labels for the artefacts using the information we learnt, and enjoyed doing observational drawing of the different objects to decorate their labels. 

We had a very exciting visit from Zoolab linked to our science topic studying living things and their habitats. The visitor brought in some incredible animals and told us some fascinating facts about the animal, the features and their habitats! It was such a brilliant experience and we enjoyed holding or touching the animals carefully and safely.