On Monday, we watched some interesting video clips about different features of a castle. The children learnt lots of new vocabulary, such as battlements, drawbridge, keep moat, portcullis and bailey. The children also learnt about what life was like as a knight and a noble person. It was exciting to learn how different life was then and what a castle would have looked like inside. We all decided that it would be quite fun to live in a castle, but that we much prefer the toilets that we have now! We have also looked closely at different types of castles and had fun building our own castles using wooden blocks and different shaped pieces of card. The children added strong walls, drawbridges and turrets.

Everyone had a fantastic swimming lesson on Monday afternoon and enjoyed playing a variety of games to support their skills and confidence. To name a few of the favourite activities; collecting all the floating teddy bears as quickly as possible, playing sinkers (trying to retrieve the objects from the bottom of the pool) and jumping in from the side.

During our literacy session on Tuesday, we read the book SHHH! by Sally Grindley and Peter Utton. This is a really fun lift-the-flap book all about an adventure in a giant’s castle. The children loved the exciting story and so we decided to make our own version of the book. Everyone wrote their own page and added a scary picture and hid it under a flap to accompany their sentence. Form 1’s story had a T-rex, a cat, a turtle, a rat and lots of giants in it! We enjoyed reading it during snack time.

On Wednesday in maths, we learnt all about doubles. The children played a game where they each had a number and had to move around the carpet to find someone who had the same number to make a double. They then worked together to find the total, and we recorded their answers to refer back to throughout the week. We also had fun playing a game on the C-Touch board to practise recalling our double facts really quickly, everyone got quite competitive and we worked together to beat the clock! The children have also loved playing dominoes, using our large carpet tiles. Working in teams, the children have been great at remembering the rules of the game and taking turns matching up the doubles. This has also supported their subitising skills with numbers up to 6.

As always, the children have loved being creative this week and have enjoyed learning how to draw castles using a step-by-step video. Using black pen, the children drew their own castles and then used pastels to add colour. We experimented with adding water to the pastels and discovered it created a fascinating effect and made our castles look like watercolours. They are now proudly displayed in our classroom.

The children also enjoyed making knights' shields this week by weaving different coloured pieces of card. It was quite tricky to remember to weave the opposite way than the first piece of card but the children persevered well. It was suggested by the children that our shields needed handles, so these were added and the Form 1 knights were ready for battle!