Adventures in Space and lots more besides!

We certainly took the new year to new heights!

2014 got off to a great start this January in Hedley Park, we went to the other side of the world, explored deepest space, went back to the land of the dinosaurs, and took a trip to meet the best young science minds in Ireland.

The Nursery class visited Australia

Starting in the nursery class we took on the wild and wonderful continent of Australia. The colour coded continents are so helpful for the children to associate the images, artefacts, plants and animals to that continent.  We enjoyed making our own koalas, and kangaroos, and painting our Australia. We also sang songs and examined all the wonderful artefacts Lisa and Magna brought in,

Another great trip the nursery class took was to the land before time. We love dinosaurs, they are our

Hands up! We love dinosaurs.

super cool top thing to play with. So we created a fantastic display complete with volcano, with lava hands and dinosaur group.  Taking our interest in dinosaurs further our teachers helped us to recognise that dinosaur begins with the sound d. In Montessori classrooms we teach the children the sounds each letter makes rather than its name, this helps the child later on to begin to build words by working out each sound.

We are growing so fast in the nursery our teachers wanted to celebrate that fact, each day we change and learn new things. It’s great to see our friends each day and find all the wonderful things to do in our class.

Blossoming in the Nursery Class.

Thankfully at the end of the day there is always a story to help us wind down.

Nursery class Story Board

Helping children to love reading is a real passion in Hedley and we have so many wonderful books and opportunities to enjoy a story on our own, in a small group or all together. One of our favourite stories recently was Town Mouse and Country Mouse.

In the Junior class we also went on a trip to the continent of Australia. We really enjoyed looking at all the photos of Australia at this time of year. Imagine they have their christmas dinner on the beach, and right now they are preparing to go back to school after their summer holidays. That just blew us away.

Australia board in the Junior Class

We have been so lucky to get a lovely new teacher, we were very happy to welcome Sinead to the school. She is helping us while our lovely Katie is away on maternity leave. We cant wait to meet your baby Katie but relax knowing that we are in good hands with Sinead and of course Aoife 🙂

The foundations of good handwriting which begin by tracing the sandpaper sounds in the

K for Koala

nursery class are perfected in the junior class. We enjoy practicing our sound writing and we are very proud of our K’s and P’s , Kangaroos, Koalas and Platypus were our inspiration. The final stop on our tour of Australia was a study of silhouette and horizon. We think you’ll agree they are magical.

Last but not least our Senior class  went on quite the tour, starting with a trip to the BT Young Scientist Exhibition on the 9th of January. We love the young scientist, its such an inspiration to meet all the older children and their projects alongside professional scientists all of whom had amazing things to show us.

This is how we roll!

Circular tessellation.

This inspired us to take on some experiments of our own, from physics to geometry. We hypothesised, predicted, observed and recorded many different ideas. Lots of work on materials and shapes help us discover how the world works, and what the properties of each matter are.

Working on our literacy and creativity we enjoyed writing about “If I lived in a Snowglobe”.  This fun imaginative exercise really got us thinking and you can see the results were captivating. Some of them are displayed for you to admire.

Of course if you are a parent or relative of someone in the senior class you will have heard all about our adventures in space. We have spent wonderful times comparing and contrasting planet properties, sizes, shapes, temperatures. How light travels through space, in particular how the light of our sun creates night and day on earth.

I’m sure you’ll agree we’ve been busy and the month isn’t even over yet! This week we are celebrating The Year of the Horse. We will have a traditional Chinese feast on Thursday after our last Mandarin class of the year of the snake. We will even have royalty visiting, with a special appearance of an Emperor and Empress. Come back soon to see how much fun we had.

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