Welcome to Badger Class!

Badger Class is our Reception class, where Miss Pistell and Mrs Hedges are the class teachers and Mrs Dyer is our teaching assistant.

We will regularly update this page with news and photos of the exciting learning we have been doing at school.  Also, please check your child's book bag on a daily basis.

Our PE days are Tuesday and Friday.  Please come to school in your PE kit on Tuesday for outdoor PE.  On Friday we will doing indoor PE and will change at school.

Please follow the link below to access our Topic Web, Maths Medium Term Plan and Yearly Topic Planning.  You will also find spelling and reading lists for Reception alongside other material for you to assist your child in their learning.

Term 5

This term our topic will be 'Eric Carle'.  During this term we will be looking at different books written by Eric Carle and learning about the subject matter in the books. In phonics, we will continue to apply the phonics we have been learning to our reading and writing.  We will not be learning any new sounds, but please continue to use the red book and flashcards to support your child's learning at home.  Please continue to share story books and your child's reading book as often as possible - we change reading books on a Tuesday and Friday, if your child has read their book twice - please ensure you have made a note of each time they read in the yellow reading record.  This term we will be learning to tell the story 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' by Eric Carle. In maths, we will continue to count daily moving onto counting to 20 and beyond. We will be learning about the composition of number and applying the things we know in new situations.  We will be thinking about 'Relationships' in PSHE and continuing to develop our bat and ball skills and multi skills in PE sessions.  We will be looking at the life cycles of animals particularly the butterfly.  In RE we will looking at stores from other religions.

Term 5

Week 3

'Who's been eating our fruit?' 

The children were excited to see that some of our fruit had big holes in it.  We thought about what could have eaten it and came up with the idea that 'A Very Hungry Caterpillar' may have been eating it.  We looked at some models of the lifecycle of a butterfly before reading the story.  We have continued with this story all week and have been learning some actions to help us tell the story.

We have also enjoyed using phonic cubes to help us with some writing during choosing time.  Again we have been using our outdoor area to play in the sand pit, water tray and paint with water on our chalk board.  We have also used real paints to create pictures.  

Week 2

This week we have been enjoying the lovely weather and taking advantage of the outdoor area.  We have been creating our own models using junk materials, paining with water on our chalk board, reading stories in the Story Shed and digging in the sand pit.  We had some special visitors in our digging area (dinosaurs) which created a bit of excitement.   We spent an afternoon in the sunshine with our Badger Buddies.  We chased bubbles from a bubble machine, played 'duck, duck, goose' and 'Dusty Bluebells'.  We then got the parachute out and played games with beanbags, running under the parachute and a few games of cat and mouse.

Week 1

This week we have been reading the stories Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? and Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What do you hear?  We have been outside looking for things that we can see, then wrote about those things adding adjectives to describe them.  We have also been outside listening to the things we could hear children talking, birds tweeting, leaves rustling, cars brrring and wind whooshing. We have also had lots of fun in the sand pit and using the new planks to build our own obstacle course.

Term 4

Week 6

This week we have had Spiritual day, Commonwealth Games activities, a visit to the church for our Easter Service and an Easter egg hunt.  On Tuesday we got to see a Commonwealth Games Baton and then raced with it before passing it to Squirrel class.  On Friday we went on an Easter egg hunt.  We made rabbit ears to wear, then hunted for plastic eggs in the field.  At the end of the day we exchanged our eggs for real chocolate!

Week 5

This week we have been learning about the importance of keeping clean and washing.  We washed our hands, some of our toys and some vegetables for us to eat.  We enjoyed reading to our Badger Buddies outdoors and enjoyed playing games with our Badger Buddies when we dressed in yellow and blue for Ukraine.  We also enjoyed exploring some new toys.

Farm Trip

We've had a wonderful day at the farm and the weather couldn't have been better.  The children thoroughly enjoyed the day and made us all proud!

Week 3

This week we have been enjoying the sunshine (except Wednesday) and making the most of our outdoor area.  In PE, we have been practising our throwing and catching skills, while on Friday we took our dance outside where we practised  both our superhero dance and some traditional dances like 'In and out the dusty bluebells' and 'The farmers in his den'.  On Wednesday, we finally got to taste our Turnip Soup.  Lots of the children really enjoyed it, while some weren't so sure, however we were really proud of the children, who all had a try.  In the afternoon they got to taste some hot cross buns and noticed how the Easter story is represented in the hot cross bun.  In maths this week, we have been making 7 in lots of different ways and noticing the number bonds for 7, including using dinosaurs, farm animals and duplo.  We have spent lots of time planting seeds, and learning about what plants need this week.  We planted herbs in the tyres outdoors and planted other seeds in small pots to grow in our classroom.  We have also been examining the plants we are growing from the vegetables indoors.  This week we have been adapting our story 'The Enormous Turnip'.  We have changed the turnip, the farmer, the farmer's wife and the dog to different characters.  We have then been telling our adapted stories to each other and we have been busy recording the stories individually.  

Week 2

We had fun pretending our pirate ship was Santa's sleigh this week.  We are trying to grow vegetables from other vegetables this week.  We have set up the experiment and will continue to watch to see if they will grow.  We enjoyed examining the lettuce too, and then even used it to draw on.  Lots of the children have enjoyed feeling the rice this week.  We started using it to form letters in, but making piles seemed more fun!  Today we told our story to Owl Class and made some turnip soup.  Unfortunately it was not delicious like our story.  The turnips we used we far from enormous as you can see in the photo (unless you are a doll), so there was not enough mixture for the soup maker to work.  We had fun watching it being prepared and smelling all the ingredients.  Mrs Hedges has said she will make some more at home and bring it in for us to try on Wednesday.

Week 1

We've had a busy start to our first week of term.  We began the week looking for turnips in some soil but none of them were enormous like in our story we are learning.  We had fun with some Pancake PE on Tuesday.  In maths we've been thinking about 5 and a bit - 8 is 5 and 3, 6 is 5 and 1.  We had a wonderful day filled with books on World Book Day (see below) and on Friday we managed to enjoy some sunshine and have tried our best to save a bee we found.

World Book Day

We have had a great day exploring books in many ways.  We loved looking at each others  costumes and even drew pictures of our wonderful costumes.  We made reading crowns where we decorated crowns with different book marks.  We listened to World Book Day Rap and tried to spot all the books that were in the song.  Later our Badger Buddies read some of these books to us.  Of course we shared lots of stories throughout the day.  

Term 3

Week 7

This week we had a visit from Mr Bales, who talked about the job of a police officer.  We got to wear lots of different pieces of uniform and learn about the different roles of a police officer. We have been learning about 2d shape in maths and noticing shapes within shapes.  We have been completing jigsaws and have created a wonderful piece of art by using triangles to create the sea, circles for the sky, then we created houses and boats using squares, rectangles, triangles and circles.  We also filled our marble jar, so as a reward the children chose to use the dressing up clothes.

Week 6 

This week we have had 2 visitors to help us with learning about People Who Help Us.  Mr Thornes came to talk about his role as a paramedic.  The children had to take good care of the soft toys and learned to carry them on a stretcher.  Mr Lawrence came to talk to us about his role as a Harbour Pilot and the different roles on ships.  The children enjoyed taking on different jobs such as captain, navigational officer and of course the cook!  In maths we have been sharing objects equally and the children have enjoyed creating their own homes using the construction materials.

Week 5

What a lot of learning done this week! We learnt about the celebration of Chinese New Year. We painted our own dragon to do a dragon dance, made our own lanterns and learnt about the traditions of Chinese New Year. In maths, we have been looking at the composition of the numbers 6 and 7 so that we know what numbers 'make' them. We also wore our number tabards to help us learn how to order numbers. We looked carefully at the world around us by taking part in our own mini 'Birdwatch'. There were lots of crows and pigeons - but we spotted our resident robin in our outdoor area too!

Week 4

This week we have been taking our fingerprints like a police officer may do and examining them closely with a magnifying glass.  We have also been getting creative, enjoying the junk modelling materials. On Friday, we had lots of fun creating our class picture as a reward for filling our marble jar.  I know many of you got to look at our wonderful piece of art while it was drying outside.

Week 3

We've had a busy week, telling the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff using the masks we made, playing in mud and looking at the outdoors look in winter.  We've also been ordering numbers, wearing numbered tabards and using the song from the Numberblocks episode 'Off We Go'.  We had an amazing day on Thursday during Wordly Day (see photos below).

Wordly Day

We've had a wonderful day learning about the qualities we need to be Worldly Global explorers.  We looked at a timecapsule that we found that children who went to our school 50 years had made.  We then talked about the things we liked to do and drew pictures and wrote a sentence about those things.  We then talked about how we will be celebrating the Queen's Platinum Jubilee and thought about a pudding we could design to celebrate.  We drew a picture of our own design and then made our own puddings using custard, jelly, rice pudding and angel delights - we didn't eat them, we just had fun making them.  Next we learned to say a few words in Spanish before tasting some Spanish food.  Not many of us liked the olives or gazpacho but almost everyone (including the staff) liked the churros!  We also talked about how we can be show courageous advocacy by looking after those who don't have a voice of their own.  During the afternoon we learnt about the art of origami - Japanese paper folding and made our own paper planes and tested them inside and outside. Then we re-used materials to make some junk models, lots of us made octopus, which we looked at examples of, but some of use made their own models.  Finally we learned a little about Kenya from our parent visitor.  

Week 2

This week we have been learning the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff.  We have been enjoying telling the story using masks, and toys and making our own masks.  We have been learning new graphemes - the actions are in the red books and flashcards are in the coloured wallets.  We have continued subitising and have been playing games with dice - I hope you get a chance to play the game that we sent home this week.  In our indoor PE we have been learning the beginning of a dance which we will keep building on. 

Week 1

Welcome back to school after, what I hope, has been a lovely Christmas break.  We have had a busy start to the term, with children writing lovely sentences about the things they received for Christmas and reminding ourselves of our phonics.  In maths we have been naming and finding 2 d shapes, looking for lots of different shapes in the classroom and outside.  We have introduced our new topic to the children and talked about all the different jobs that people who help us do.  We decided to change our role play areas to a Vets and a police station and are in the process of doing this.  We have also completed the NSPCC PANTS lesson - please see the link below for more details and if you get a chance, you may enjoy the Pantosaurus song.

Term 2

Week 7

What a wonderful week we have had, to end Term 2.  The children were magnificent in their Nativity production and looked amazing in their wonderful costumes.  We have continued with lots of learning based around Christmas, creating Christmas crafts and enjoying taking on the roles of elves and 
Father Christmas in the tree houses.  On Thursday, we were joined by our Badger Buddies and the rest of Owls for a small Christmas party, where we played pass the parcel, musical animals and over under game.  On Friday, we joined Hedgehog class to play our story action game, where we each had a character and whenever we heard that character in the story we ran around the circle.  The children looked great in their Christmas jumpers.

Week 6

This week, we have been enjoying preparing for Christmas.  One Monday, we celebrated St Nicholas Day and made images of St Nicholas using red paper.  We have been learning about the 3 kings and their journey and made crowns for the king and dressed up as Mary and Joseph.  We have been experimenting with colour with our paintings.  When the weather has allowed, we have been having lots of fun in the treehouses.  We decorated a tree to go in the home treehouse and dressed up in Santa's workshop. We have also been practising lots for our nativity performance.

Week 5

We have loved starting to celebrate the build up to Christmas this week. We had a visit from The Bridge and they showed us all the meanings of the different colours of Christmas. On the 1st of December our class advent calendar arrived! Each of us have created a festive piece of art to be revealed each day. Our treehouse has also been transformed into Santa's Grotto. We have had a lot of fun dressing up and wrapping presents. We also used snowflakes to help us with our numeral recognition. 

Week 4

This week we have been learning about the number 5. We have been subitising to 5 and counting objects up to 5. We have loved grinding up the wheat for the Little Red Hen so much that we decided to test out other food materials to see if we could grind them as well. In PSHE, we thought about what makes our homes special. In small groups, we made a house for teddy and explained what made it special for him. In RE, we were learning about the symbols of Christmas and sorted which were Christian symbols and which were not. Finally, we have had lots of fun building obstacle courses in our construction area.

Week 3

This week we have continued to learn our Little Red Hen story and have enjoyed grinding wheat to try to make flour, forming letters in the flour and acting out the story using our masks.  We have also been writing CVC words for the characters in our story.  In maths we have been looking at groups and identifying which group has more and which has fewer.  We have dressed in our waterproof clothes to play in the mud and have created our own obstacle courses.  We are getting quicker at changing for PE and have enjoyed being stars in our gymnastics sessions.  The children all dressed up for Children in Need day, wearing either yellow, spots or PE kit.

Week 2

This week we introduced our story, The Little Red Hen.  The children followed a trail of corn to find the Little Red Hen and some bread, which we then ate.  We have spent the rest of the week learning to tell the story and making masks to use in our retelling of the story.  We have been using tools, by cutting wheat and mark making in flour.  We have also been enjoying Autumn, using leaves and seeds to make repeating patterns and going for a walk to look at the environment and the changes that Autumn has brought.  We are very fortunate to have so many trees to observe the wonderful colours.  We attended the remembrance worship at school on Thursday and managed the 2 minute silence without any issues.  This meant we managed to fill our marble jar, so enjoyed an extra play on the playtrail as a reward.

Week 1

We've had a busy start to Term 2 with lots of special things to celebrate.  We've introduced our next quality for our Global Explorer Curriculum which is to be 'Aspirational' with a special Aspirational Day on Wednesday.  We learned about science from some parent visitors from DSTL, built bridges from different construction materials and enjoyed a science show in the afternoon.  We also discussed what jobs we'd like to do when we grown up and drew pictures or wrote our chosen careers.   We also enjoyed dressing up as some people who help us. (Please see the gallery for more photos).  On Thursday we celebrated Divali, by creating Rangoli pictures using coloured rice and shapes and on Friday we celebrated bonfire night by colouring pictures, creating more pictures with shapes and tracing our name in glue before sprinkling them with glitter.  

Term 1

Badger Buddies

We are thrilled to be able to have Badger Buddies again this year.  Each child in Badger class has been paired with a Year 6 child from Owl class to be their Badger Buddy.  We will often link up and the Owl children will help the Badger children to feel settled, safe and secure at school.  They will also listen to them read and help with other activities where many hands help.  We have had a couple of lovely sessions with our Badger Buddies, playing with them and getting to know each other and the Owls have enjoyed listening to the Badgers telling their stories from their reading books and showing us their classroom.

Week 8

What a busy last two days of term! On Monday we had our Resourcefulness Day and we did lots of fun activities to show teamwork, independence, kindness and perseverance. We passed around a hula hoop without breaking the chain and worked together to keep a balloon off the ground. We also created a beautiful rainbow - we made a couple of pieces each and then put them altogether.

Then on Tuesday as part of our class treat for filling the marble jar we had a Gingerbread Man Day! We made our own gingerbread and had lots of fun making gingerbread men playdoh and designing our own bridges for the gingerbread man to cross over safely. Have a lovely half term! 

Week 7

We've had another busy week as we've reached the final full week of our first term at school.  This week, we have been learning the rules of counting:

1. Count everything once

2. Say the numbers in the correct order

3.  The last number is how many you have

We've also had fun playing schools, mark making in glitter and enjoying our new giant numicon.  We also had a visit from The Bridge Project, who regularly visit our school for Christian workshops.  This week we continued our learning about creation.  We also got to use our bikes for the first time on the playground.  Thank you to all the parents who came to look around our classroom and joined our phonics session.

Week 6

This week we have been reading the book 'Whoever You Are' and talking about things that are the same as others and things that are different.  We then chose our favourite colour to create a handprint and created a display for the book.  We have also enjoyed examining the sunflower seeds and playing on the play trail.

Week 5

This week we have been creating our own self portraits, planting daffodils with the rest of the school, learning the sounds some letters make, finding matching pairs and ordering objects by size.  We've also been for a walk around the school grounds looking for the last signs of summer and enjoying observing the insects we found - we also used these for counting groups and finding the total of 2 groups.

Week 4

We've had another busy week with yet more new experiences.  This week we've been sorting items in different ways in maths and enjoying the books 'The Tiger Who Came to Tea' and 'You Choose' in English.  We've also experienced our first fire drill, our first full worship, school photos and show and tell - we earned lots of marbles for our jar for how well we have managed these new activities and earned a reward of an extra play on the playtrail. We have also been examining sunflowers and enjoyed reading to our Badger buddies again.

Week 3

We've had a fantastic week with the children managing so well in their first week of full days.  We had lots of new experiences, such as PE, Badger Buddies and our first worship.  We've even enjoyed the cows visiting us in the field next door.

Week 2

We've had lots of fun during our first full week of school, and I'm sure the children are feeling tired.  We've celebrated another birthday in our class this week!  On Thursday we wore our class waterproof jackets to play in the rain.  All children have now been given a reading book, please share this book with your child. Next Monday the children will meet on the playground in the morning and line up with the rest of the school.  

Week 1

We have had a wonderful beginning to our school year, with the children making lots of new friends and enjoying exploring our school environment.  We've even celebrated a birthday this week.

Sports Day

Please use our link to the gallery to see lots of photos from our EYFS and KS1 sports day.  We had a wonderful morning, with the children making up for the lack of spectators with lots of cheering for their friends.  

Bump Up Day

We had a lovely afternoon visiting Squirrel class.  We made our own rockets and decorated them, then fired them into the air and measured how far they went.

Football

We all have our fingers crossed that England will win the Euro 2020 this evening, or at least do their best, just like Badgers did when we were playing football last week. 

Creative Day

Today we held the first of our Curriculum days to launch our Global Explorer Curriculum. We kept asking the question 'What ideas have you shared today?' and we found that we had lots of ideas that we can share with each other to work together.

We began the day by making Leaf Mandalas.  We collected leaves, stones, bark, chippings, sticks, daisies and other natural materials we found.  We then worked in groups of 2 or 3 to create our own mandalas on large pieces of paper.  Our creations were wonderful and we enjoyed learning about each others mandalas. 

After that we enjoyed listening to some Folk Music by Dovetail Trio, where we learned about different instruments, learned some new songs and even enjoyed a bit of country dancing.

After break we made some paper lanterns, spending lots of time on colouring our lanterns and carefully cutting them. 

During the afternoon, we made wands, by cutting out shapes for the top and gluing them around a willow stick, before decorating the wands. 

Finally we made crowns, cutting the shapes at the top and decorating them. 

RE Day

Today we spent the day concentrating on RE.  We talked about the schools Christian Values, concentrating on the value 'Thankfulness'.  We talked about what we are thankful for - parents you will be pleased to know that lots of children mentioned that they were thankful for their 'Mums and Dads' and 'family'.  'School', 'teachers' and 'food' were also mentioned.

We spent some time learning the story of The Ten Lepers from the bible, which demonstrates 'Thankfulness'.  We all contributed to a collage of the story, which will be put up in the hall, as well as doing our own images and acting out the story.  We then performed our story to Mrs Smith and Squirrel and Hedgehog Classes during worship at the end of the day.

Bug Ball

During our topic on Eric Carle, we read lots of stories involving insects that he had written, including The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Very Busy Spider and the The Bad Tempered Ladybird.  To celebrate the end of the topic we held a Bug Ball, where we made masks to wear before enjoying some party games, such as Bug, Bug, Beetle (Duck, Duck, Goose), musical statues and balloon games and enjoying some bug inspired snacks - some vegetables that insects like to eat like cucumber and carrots and some food that looked like insects like our grape beetles and raisin flies.  

Fire Safety Session

On Thursday, we had a zoom visit from Wiltshire Fire Service, where we learned about what a firefighter does and things that are safe for us to play with and things that are not safe.  We had some fun joining a firefighter for some Wake and Shake activities.

World Book Day

We had lots of fun dressing up as book characters and learning about the characters from James and the Giant Peach.  We watched videos of real bugs, then made ladybirds using paper plates, spiders by printing using tubes and drawing grasshoppers using step by step instructions.  We caught bugs from our own magic similar to the magic left by the Old Man in the story James and the Giant Peach.  We also had the opportunity to look at books!

Christmas

We have had a lovely couple of weeks in Badger Class getting ready to celebrate Christmas, with our nativity, Christmas lunch wearing our festive jumpers, a visit from Father Christmas and then enjoying the wonderful playground gifts he bought.

Term 2 

This term, we have enjoyed lots of firework activities on Thursday 5th November, celebrated Remembrance Day and have had fun playing estate agents linked to our topic on Homes.  We have also made houses using shapes and wooden bricks.  We have been learning about different materials through the story of The Three Little Pigs.  We have attempted to make houses using straws, sticks and bricks, with differing levels of success.  We have also enjoyed painting fingerprint leaves on our tree.  We have enjoyed lots of Christmas activities, sorting wrapped numicon pieces to unwrapped pieces, creating Christmas trees using numicon pieces and creating baubles on a Christmas tree by dropping coloured vinegar onto Christmas trees created from bicarbonate of soda. 

Phonics Training

Thank you to those parents that were able to join us for our phonics training.  Please find a PDF of the powerpoint used in the training - if you have any questions, please ask.

Badger Class Learning

Have a look at the learning we will be doing this year by following the link below.

Reading

The children in Badger Class will now be bringing reading books home.  To begin with books have no words and are used to encourage children to talk about what is happening in the pictures.  We will listen to your child read at least once a week, but in order for your child to make progress in their reading, we need you to support them and listen to them read at least 5 times a week.

Making Friends

The children have settled really well at school and have enjoyed exploring all the different areas of the classroom, both indoors and outdoors.  They have all been learning to make friends and cooperate with each other, taking turns and sharing.  We are very proud of the way they have adapted to school life at St Nicholas CE (VA) Primary School. 

Help

As our topic is All About Me, we would really like to give the children the opportunity to share something they enjoy doing with the class.  If you have one or two photos of your child taking part in a hobby or something that they would like to share with their friends, please email office@stnicholas.wilts.sch.uk and head it Badger Photo. You may like to add a little information to enable us to help your child share their photo with their class.

Thank you.

Class Reward

We have already earned our first class reward and went for a walk in our school woods.