Welcome to Kingfishers page!

We hope you enjoy looking at our learning throughout the year.

Our PE days are Tuesday and Friday - please ensure your child wears their PE kit and plimsolls with their school jumper on PE days.  Home learning is due in every other Thursday ready to be sent back out the next day.  This is set on Google Classroom unless you have requested a paper copy.  In Kingfishers, children change their reading books independently and daily.  They will bring home one small book and one big book - the small book is for them to read to you and the big book is for an adult to read to them.  Please ensure your child brings a water bottle and warm clothing for break and lunch time.

Thank you!

Term 1 - Material Monsters

This term, we've been immersing ourselves in a variety of monster books where we've been focussing on using adjectives and conjunctions in character profiles, sequenced events using sentence openers and written our own rhyming monster poems.  The stories we've enjoyed reading are The Gruffalo's Child, Where the Wild Things Are and Monsters Love Underpants.  We've also created our own monster artwork by using our knowledge of colour mixing to create monster paintings before turning them into collages.  As part of our home learning, we also created 3D monster models!

DT Monster Sandwiches

Kingfishers have been busy taste testing sandwich ingredients such as sweetcorn, tomatoes, chicken, different breads and spreads before selecting the ingredients they wanted to use to make a sandwich for a monster.  Following their learning on kitchen safety, the children carefully cut and grated ingredients to form their sandwiches and then took them home for the all important taste test.

Super Shapes! 

In term 1, Kingfishers have been learning about 2D and 3D shapes. We have been looking at their properties and key mathematical vocabulary such as vertices, edges and faces. Kingfishers have been sorting shapes according to their properties and thinking about ‘What is the same? What is different?’ They also had the opportunity to make 3D models and name the shape they had made.

Term 2 - An Island Home

This term we have been researching the Isle of Coll in Scotland which is also known as the Isle of Struay in the Katie Morag stories.  Before looking at the island, we used atlases and Google Earth to locate it within the United Kingdom - to do this we needed to identify the four countries and capital cities in the UK and the seas and oceans which surround the country.  We have been identifying the human and physical features of the island and its village as well as forming comparisons with the town of Dartford. 

To summarise all of our geographical knowledge, we created our own Isle of Coll information booklets to show what the island has to offer from things to do to the wildlife you will find there.

In our art lessons, we created a new tartan skirt for Katie Morag by using weaving and we used watercolour paints to paint a human or physical feature on the Isle of Coll; the lighthouse, Herons Wood and bonny loch were some of our masterpieces.  We studied the sizes and shapes of objects in order to ensure our paintings were in good proportion.

Term 2 Computing 

This term, Kingfishers have been learning about algorithms in Computing. We started off by looking at how algorithms can be used to programme a character in a game then we moved onto machine learning. We played Google Quick, Draw!, which is a drawing game that uses algorithms to guess the images drawn. Children created their own small models out of lego and had to write instructions for how to build it for someone else to follow. Through this, they discovered what made a really good algorithm and how you could use that in games like Coding for Carrots. I have included the links for the games we played below as children really enjoyed these this term.

Mrs Powell

https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/

 https://doodles.google/doodle/celebrating-50-years-of-kids-coding/

Term 3 - The Great Fire of London

Kingfishers have had a very exciting term learning about the historic event which destroyed our capital city of London.  Before looking at the event in detail, we thought about the time period of 1666 and how houses were built back then in comparison to other time periods and modern day houses.  We've created our own timeline of events to show what happened on each day of the fire and thought about the reasons why the fire spread so quickly.  There were significant individuals during the Great Fire of London - Thomas Farriner, Samuel Pepys and King Charles II - we've looked at their roles during the event and why Samuel Pepys in particular is an important figure in British history.

We were lucky enough to take part in a Freshwater Theatre Company workshop on the Great Fire of London.  We travelled through time back to 1666 along the cobbled, narrow streets of London and thought about the sights and smells surrounding us.  We re-enacted the fire starting in the bakery and we helped to put out the fire.  We also met Samuel Pepys and King Charles II.

Fire in the bakery!

The great Fire of London started in Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane, London in 1666.  Therefore, Kingfishers made bread to experience what it would've been like working in the bakery.  We followed a set of instructions to make two loaves of bread and ensured we were being safe with equipment.  We showed teamwork and patience when weighing out ingredients, passing the ball so we could all mix the ingredients together and waiting for the dough to prove before going in the oven.  The end result was brilliant and we all enjoyed taking a slice of bread home to taste!

Great Fire of London artwork

After discovering how houses have changed over time from medieval times through to modern day, we created our own Tudor houses.  We considered the features of Tudor houses, including their black, wooden beams, houses being two-storey, no glass in the windows of poorer houses and all houses being different in their appearance.

We also created artwork based on the London skyline in 1666 - we created our own silhouettes of London, during the fire, including significant buildings such as St Paul's Cathedral and London bridge.  We then used tissue paper to create our fire background by tearing strips to look like flames.