Key Stage 1 Parent Workshop

We loved our Parent Workshop last week! Year 1 and 2 made medals to present to George Stephenson, winner of the Rain Hill Trials! Miss Howe and Mrs Richardson were so impressed by our final creations! Thank-you so much to all of the parents and carers involved in our special afternoon!

Here's a closer look at some of our medals!

In year 2, we know that we are all winners!

Topic- Railways

This week Year 1 and 2 joined together to enjoy a fun filled maths lesson all about Railways! We paired up with the Year 1 children to answer some questions based on a Railway theme, using the four operations- addition, subtraction, multiplication and division!

We answered a range of questions including 1 and 2 step problems, such as a train ticket costs £2. A passenger bought 5. how much did they pay altogether?

Year 2's Trip to Beamish

On Thursday KS1 took a trip to Beamish to learn all about George Stephenson and the railways!
We had a wonderful time! Here is a quick look at our activities throughout the day...


Firstly, we went to the Wagon Way and looked at the Victorian steam locomotives! We learned some new words to describe the different parts of the trains including 'the chimney', 'the firebox', 'the boiler' and 'the pistons'. We also learned that railway tracks used to be made of wood, but when the larger steam locomotives were invented they were too heavy so they changed the wood for metal instead! Year 2 had so many great questions to ask!

When we had finished asking all of our questions we started our work shop! We became engineers for the morning and created our own clay model steam locomotives!

We are planning to paint our clay models next week in school!

Next we visited the Wagon Way house we saw how rich families lived in Victorian times!

After the Wagon Way we got the tram to the town! We loved sitting on the top deck and we loved the sweet shop even more!

The sweet shop made us hungry so we stopped for lunch, then we visited the Pit Village. We visited the mines and saw the terrible conditions that some poor Victorians had to work in! Year 2 already knew that children worked in the mines from our Queen Victoria topic but we were shocked to learn that the youngest miner on record was only 4 years old! We decided that school was a better option!

Finally, before we headed back to school, we had just enough time to visit the Victorian School and stables! We even got to stroke the Shetland Pony!

What an excellent day!

Our visit to Leam Lane Library

We had a great time during our visit to the library on Friday! We found lots of fantastic books to help us with our 'Railways' topic. We took it in turns to hunt for books with our lovely parent volunteers, and we got to choose a book for personal enjoyment! We listened to stories told by our teachers too! Year 2 enjoyed a snippet from 'The BFG', a book that we are also enjoying in class during story-time! A big thank-you to the staff at Leam Lane Library for allowing us to visit :)!

Look at all of the railway books we found for our classroom!

Victorian Cross Stitch

We loved our cross stitch creations! We had so much fun learning all about Queen Victoria and what life was like for Victorians in our topic this term! What better way to finish than to learn about the type of activities that Victorian children completed at school, in a hands on way?

The cross stitch was a little tricky, but before long we got into a rhythm and by the end we were pros! Even the backs were neat!

"Back to the Iron Age" Discovering the past with Durham university.

On Monday 14th October children from year 3 and 4 were treated to a spectacular day of Iron Age themed activities. Ross and Daniel from Durham University's outreach program showed the children some genuine Iron Age artefacts which we all held and examined. We examined the cast of a real Celtic skeleton and constructed the bones in the correct order (hopefully!). It was a brilliant day!

Making embossed coins with our own designs...

Learning about pre-history...

Dressing as the Celtic peoples would have dressed...

Discovering our British and European History from every angle!