Author: Miss Hudson

Message from Mrs Smith:

Good afternoon everybody!

I feel privileged that you and your families have opened the doors of your homes and your incredibly warm (in every sense of the word) kitchens to me this week. It has been wonderful to hear about  …

• Meal times becoming an increasingly precious part of your days now
• Recipes that have been shared with you by family members and special friends
• Traditional dishes that help you and your family to celebrate religious festivals such as Eid
• Favourite foods that bring back happy childhood memories
• How the smell of ingredients can take you straight back to a holiday in a special place
• Your efforts to plant more bee-friendly plants to help with the growing of food
• How to make a dish even more relevant with a few ‘rainbow’ ingredients
• Your treasured newly-introduced ‘Homemade Pizza and Movie’ nights
• Siblings enjoying each other’s cooking more than their mum’s (and babies not throwing it on the floor!) and being inspired by big brother’s baking skills 
• Your experiences of baking alongside granny via Skype
• Favourite recipes from around the world
• Experimenting with new recipes following ‘Mystery’ food deliveries
• How good locally-sourced food tastes – particularly when it’s the delicious rhubarb from your own garden
• Food inspired by heroes such as Mary Berry … and Joe Wicks (can he bake as well?!)
• Harvesting home-grown lettuces
• Reading novels to vegetable plants to help them grow 
• Innovative ways to get around the current flour shortages
• Baking bread for the first magical time
• How a Yorkshire Pudding and gravy should be eaten as a meal in its own right
• And how it feels to celebrate Nana and Pop’s 50th Wedding Anniversary without them, but whilst sharing and celebrating a favourite family dish that reminds you of your wonderful childhood (Happy Anniversary Nana and Pops from all at Damers!)

You have made my week once again, allowing me a beautiful insight into our community and our shared love of cooking, alongside all your regular growing and  life updates too. Thank you!

Miss Barnes is very kindly collating all of your wonderful recipes into one document and we will share this with you once complete but for now,  time for a hearty Damers feast … 

And finally, this week’s story involving a magic paintbrush and a very special celebration …

https://youtu.be/q7WvO76oWwA

Happy Birthday Damers! 

Enjoy your weekend, keeeeeeeeeeep cooking … and don’t forget that main ingredient that makes it taste even better  … ❤

With warm wishes 

Mrs Smith ☺️ 

Ladybird and Butterfly art

Try some lovely ladybird or butterfly art linked to our doubles math learning. Look at the spots on a ladybird, what do you notice? Explore symmetry when looking at the wings of a butterfly.

Create your own beautiful drawing or painting or sketch of a ladybird or butterfly. Take your time and be careful to make sure that the wings are exactly the same. You could draw your own or if you have paint you could explore painting half of the insect and then fold the painting over and print on the other side of your paper. Use some old potatoes to print a ladybird shape and then add spots. Make sure the spots create an even number. 

Play your cards right! 

Play a version of the 90’s game show. Prepare number cards to 10, making sure all your numbers are formed correctly and then shuffle them up and place them face down in a line. Turn over a card, read the number and then try to guess if the next card will be higher or lower based on the card you’ve just turned over. Turn over the next card to see if you were right. Remember that, although this is a guessing game, you need to think about the cards – the higher the number the more likely it is that the next card will be lower and visa versa. Play until all the cards are gone. Repeat, shuffling the cards for a new game or challenging somebody else to play in your home or over video call. Encourage children to use ‘more’ and ‘less’ language.

Bingo!

Reuse your 1-10 number cards to play a game of bingo! First,  you will need to also create number cards 11-20 (or 30) to extend your quick number recognition. Next, shuffle up all the cards and place them in a pile, face down. Then, create some muddled up bingo grids ready to cross off or cover up the number called out. Grab a pen or counters and you are ready to play. First person to cross out a line of numbers shouts BINGO! 

Earth Day

Earth Day is celebrating its 50th anniversary today. It is a global event that happens every year where more than 1 billion people take part in what is the largest civic-focused day of action in the world.  Usually, people march, sign petitions, meet with their elected officials, plant trees, clean up their towns and roads. Environment Organisations and governments use it to make pledges and announce sustainability measures. 

The theme  this year is Climate Action. Earth Day is running a Climate Action Challenge which you might like to get involved with at home. https://www.earthday.org/earth-day-challenge/ 

We would like you to take part in this day if you can. You may want to link it with Mrs Smith’s assembly task this week to make it even more relevant. 

You could:

• Plant a vegetable from seed
• Reuse an item like newspaper, carton or toilet roll tube to make a plant pot or maybe upcycle something in your house giving it a new life as a plant container
• Reduce your food waste
• Create a healthy snack
• Make a meal from locally sourced food 
• Try a plant based meal for lunch or dinner if you’ve never tried one  
• Make your own wormery  
• Make a bug hotel or a bird box using recycled items that could be found around the home 
• Sow wildflower seeds to create a habitat for bees and insects
• Make a pledge linked with protecting our environment
• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Repair, Refuse, Rethink! 

You might have your own ideas about what you could do on this day.  Please send photos with a short explanation of what you did along with any environmental pledges to earthday@damers.dorset.sch.uk by Friday. 

Finally, you could watch Jane Goodall: “The Hope” documentary  on Wednesday 22nd April at 8pm on National Geographic and Nat Geo WILD.

Have a great Earth Day, we look forward to seeing what you got up to. 

Maths:

Whilst thinking about Earth day and Mrs Smith’s cooking themed assembly this week, why not include some maths learning. 

Counting – carefully count out how many seeds you have at home, how many recycled items you have found for a bug hotel or how many different types of ingredients you have for your cooking. 

Weighing – use scales to weigh out your ingredients for your cooking. Have a go at reading the numbers on the scales. Compare which food items are heavier and order them from heaviest to lightest. 

Shapes – what 2D and 3D shapes can you spot in your recycled items for the bug hotel? Are there any shapes in the food you use for your cooking or the kitchen items you use? 

Phonics

It is really important that you keep reading and writing those tricky words. To help with this you could try this spooky look, cover, write, check game. There isn’t a foundation stage option but the year 1 words are words that you will know. 

http://www.ictgames.com/mobilePage/spookySpellings/index.html

Silly Sentences

This week have a go at reading and writing some silly sentences.  Grown ups if you write one word at a time allowing children to read slowly and carefully. Choose sentences to suit your child or use ones below. Encourage your child to have a go at writing their own one for you to read too. 

A fox can sleep in a box.

The sun is wet.

A chimp can hang on a chair.

We go to bed at lunch time.

A cow can bark.

The pot can sing.

Segmenting to spell – hide the bear! 

Why not try to write the different areas of your home.

Grown ups can use one of your stuffed toys and hide it around a room in your house while you shut eyes. Open your eyes and find your toy, write down where it is or something that it is near! Places that your toy could be hidden are chair, stool, books, bed, lamp, picture, desk, freezer (as an extension use positional language – on top of the bed, under the stool, next to the books) Keep moving the toy around. 

Today is PE day!

We hope you have been enjoying joining in with Joe Wicks or the Comic Yoga PE sessions. To mix things up a little you could always try a few of the following dances from Just Dance on YouTube!

Welcome back!

We hope that you all had a lovely Spring Break and were able to enjoy some of the good weather. We are still missing all of you and hope that we can all see each other again soon. 

During the Summer term we will offer some home learning suggestions based on farming, growing and animals, this should fit nicely with the assemblies that we had just before the spring break too. We will be learning about plant life cycles and where our food comes from, typical farm animals and the names of their young. For our maths learning we will be exploring pattern, shape and doubles. 

Let’s kick off our new topic with this wonderful story by Eric Carle called ‘The Tiny Seed’. If you have a copy of this at home please read it today, if not please watch it here. 

Today we would love you to be seed investigators. Why not take a pad and pen with you on a walk and try to find as many things as you can that have grown from a seed. You or your grown up could write the names of the things that you find down or draw some pictures. 

You could also take a look at the food you have in your house to see which foods have seeds in them or which foods may have grown on a plant or tree from a seed.

Happy seed hunting friends!

Don’t forget to check back daily for more learning ideas. We would love to hear what you have been up to so comment on the blog or post a picture on EExAT. 🙂

Message from Mrs Smith:

Goodness me I have missed you during the Easter break but I am delighted that we have a chance to get all the blogs up and running today and to start our week together again – Good Morning everybody!

As always, your grown-ups have an email to help with the assembly this week and I’ve included a few extra clips in the notes if you would like to learn more.

It has been great to hear about all the growing that has been happening in homes and gardens over the last few weeks and I have loved hearing about the awe and wonder that many of you have experienced when seeing green shoots appear for the very first time. 

This leads us beautifully on to this week’s assembly theme which is all about the outcome of this focus on health and growing – food.

Think about all the special times that you have shared with family and friends and how often food has played an important role in this. 

These images may help but I know that you will have thoughts of your own too. Maybe it will be the times that you’ve had tea at a friend’s house, grandma’s spaghetti bolognese, the smell of baking bread at Cranborne, the awe and wonder of seeing lots of varieties of carrots in our school garden … all show us the importance of food in our lives but also the way that it often makes us feel great. Some of these things are still happening, but some may be on pause for a while or may be happening in a different way now as we discover new ways to keep in touch.

You will know that the adults that work with you in school are usually smiling, but I’m not sure if you know that one of the main things that helps them to do this (apart from all of you obviously) is food! 

Did you know that whenever Mrs Smith has a really tricky job to do, Mrs Baillie often knows and bakes the most delicious Northern Irish fridge cake called ‘15s’ to keep her smiling? Did you also know that Mr Misun sometimes orders in pizza to keep meetings running smoothly, Mrs Bracey keeps everyone planning creatively with her tasty cheese scones, Miss Barnes livens up many a staff lunch with her homemade falafel and houmous, Mrs Watts and Mr Stone often make Mrs Smith pancakes for breakfast, Mr Oram invests in expensive crackers to accompany cheese and to keep the grown-ups going long after you’ve all gone home, Miss Hudson has a great recipe for vegan cheese, Mr Tims loves baking and Mrs Smith has sometimes arrived home to a most beautiful parcel waiting on her doorstep, filled with her favourite foods and edible love from our carrot cake making expert Miss Nesbitt?!

Food plays such a special role in our lives and while many of us are now in lockdown, we are being given the chance to think about its importance, to grow our own, to celebrate our favourite foods, to cook meals together with our families and to think about love and how it sometimes appears in edible form when sharing food.

There is a lovely campaign at the moment, led by one of our supermarkets (other supermarkets are available and are doing an equally amazing job of supporting us all!) which is designed to celebrate how we pass on much loved recipes through generations of families and within our community. 

I know that many of you are doing similar things, cooking a favourite family meal and eating with much missed friends and family virtually where you can. 

Hopefully this will provide the inspiration for our community activity this week – a chance to share images of your best loved dishes / favourite meals / treats. Your grown up will help you to share images of your cooking and favourite dishes with me but I would also love it if you could share some of your favourite recipes, maybe decorating them and giving them a catchy title such as ‘Uncle Pete’s Pumpkin Pie’.

Alongside this activity this week, I thought it might be good to revisit a project that I shared with some of you in assembly a while ago … 

Newquay’s Community Orchard. You may remember me telling you about Luke Berkeley and how he had turned his life around with a positive focus on nature, community and the joy in growing and sharing food. The clip below shows the community’s Harvest celebration and the amazing way that food can bring everyone together.

And finally, I know that Mr Moore will be sending you information this week linked with the Earth Day celebrations that are planned for Wednesday 22 April. You may want to link some of the activities that are suggested by Mr Moore with our assembly this week in your quest to support ‘Climate Action’ too.

I can’t wait to hear from you (your grown-up will help you to share pictures and recipes with me). I will reply to any messages that come in and I will share all the highlights in our Celebration Assembly on Friday.

Let’s get cooking together this week Team Damers, I can’t wait to dine with you and look forward to the day when we are all back in school sharing a meal together again.

Mrs Smith ☺

Have a wonderful day!

Have a wonderful day 🙂

Find some links below to other activities you could try over the break!

Take part in a daily challenge using photography as medium for learning, exploring and recording. No hi-tech gear needed, you can use a camera phone or tablet …

https://www.youtube.com/user/cherys88?disable_polymer=true

Why not have a go at some of these Maths Challenges based around stories.

https://whiterosemaths.com/homelearning/early-years/

Try some Easter baking with these delicious recipes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/collections/easter_baking_with_kids

If you are able to get out and about why not try these challenges from the RSPB

https://www.rspb.org.uk/fun-and-learning/for-families/family-wild-challenge/activities/signs-of-spring/

https://www.rspb.org.uk/fun-and-learning/for-families/family-wild-challenge/

Try some fun Easter based science experiments! Remember Twinkl is now free to all when you sign up!

https://www.twinkl.co.uk/resource/t-t-26945-eyfs-easter-themed-science-experiments-resource-pack

https://fun-science.org.uk/top-5-science-activities-home/

You could always try joining in with one of Andy’s Wild Workouts! Learn how to move like lots of amazing animals. Remember to warm up and stretch! Think about stretching from your fingertips all the way down to your toes. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p06tmn51/andys-wild-workouts-series-1-1-under-the-sea

Have a great break everyone!