During book week my Year One class made these Harry Potter Characters, and the big pop-

up book, ‘Kipper and the Dragon’.

This was our 2005 Christmas board. We created the face with paper mache’ eyes, nose and mouth, and the hair with rolls of large cheap recycled paper,

from other projects. The children had created snowflakes using fold and cutting techniques in art. The theme of our board was ‘Let it snow’, The children learnt

and sang the song.

 

This was one of the biggest projects I had undertaken so far. At the beginning of the

school year, during ‘All about me’ lessons, it became clear

that the children enjoyed films and stories set in space. We

began creating our space display, using photographs of

the children and enlarging them using a photocopier.We all enjoyed making this

display and it remains one ofthe most striking so far.

 

This was a display of Year One’s Art Work form their first two terms. We did a lot of work on colour, portraits and shape. The children were

very proud of their work as was I. The portraits were created using photos, which were photocopied before drawing on and coluring the

shapes.

 

We began looking at characters in literacy. We created a great adjectives display, and the children became very good at using these words to describe

the characters they were reading about especially the bad ones. We made lots of wanted posters of both characters from books and teachers using the target

language. We then used the paper mache’ face from Christmas as the main part of our L.S.I investigates display.

 

I have always found rhyme and poetry to be a great way of

teaching key words and ideas, and often bring in my guitar to sing with

the students.  

We did a lot of work on rhyming sounds, and using their dictionaries for ideas the children created some really nice poems. This picture was taken during the Autumn term we added new leaves every half term.

 

During a trip to Phuket, Thailand, I visited a Gibbon sanctuary, and adopted a gibbon named George. When I got back to school the children were really interested in George and his story.

We made stories and poems about George, and made this display outside our classroom to let everybody know about George and what they can do to help.

We received E-mails about Georges progress which we posted outside to keep everyone informed of what was going on.

George is very cute, and continues to make good progress toward being released.

 

As a group of teachers we decide to brighten up our dining area with a mural. Using a book on rainforests that I had been reading in literacy and geography for ideas, we

created this mural. I drew the outlines of the animals that the children chose and then everybody helped to colour them in. It was a great project that lasted half a term.

 

This picture was taken just before the board was completed. In conjunction with the P.E. department, we created a quiz based on world cup facts and predictions about the games. We also surrounded the board with famous footballers and their funny quotes. E.g. Ian Rush’s “Playing in Italy, was like

living in a foreign country!”. The world cup was made from paper mache’ during ‘making things’ club, and was given to the winner of the competition during the schools final assembly, before the summer

holidays.

 

My classroom is a word rich environment. There are displays right around the classroom dealing with everything from using adjectives, and famous fairy tale quotes to a high frequency word wall and the terms science topics. The heads have been created over the last two years to accompany the ‘Kipper’ stories

that the children read, through the Oxford Reading Tree scheme.

 

At the start of the year, we created non-fiction books on

our favourite animals. Many of the children chose animals from

the sea. So we chose this theme to create a welcome to

year one wall.

 

As part of a geography unit introducing continents and countries, we learnt how to say hello in various languages,

and started a ‘Where are we from?’ board.

 

We wrote stories using the framework of ‘First, Then, Next, After that and Finally’. We then put it on the wall for everyone to enjoy.

 

I really liked the idea of creating windows to illustrate transparency.We made a translucent Lucy, and a transparent parrot.

 

Lamps made from cardboard, skewers,

and a pomelo skin

Certainly the tallest project undertaken so far. We made this very large Christmas tree from card.

The children made the snow flakes during

symmetry lessons, and the hands during lessons

estimating and measuring length. Our

Christmas tree was over 60 hands tall!

 

A flower from a science project. We

made this from a broken plastic

didgeridoo (made during an earlier

project), a broken bin and scrap paper. Oh and a giant red pom-pom that took quite some time to make!!

 

A Three Little Pigs Christmas door. The children each made a

stocking. The note reads ‘Dear Mr Wolf, sorry no-one’s here, we’re all on holiday. Hope the fire’s not

too hot.’

  

I decided to make our reading space a little more interesting, the children all suggested themes. Having decided on castles we began making the ‘Year One reading castle.’ We then went on to make a

horse, helmets, shields, and dragons, for role plays.

Following on from work on fairy tails, we turned our door into a fairy tale house. We put the most popular quotes and characters around the

house.

Following a school trip to Dreamworld, we did work on both fiction and non-fiction and used it to create this stunning display.

During our fist term we looked at different ways of creating portraits of ourselves and used them to decorate this board.

After looking at examples of stained glass, these students picked a cartoon character, and traced it on to plastic before colouring it in. The

results were great, and the children loved showing off their work.  

I love listening to and playing songs on my guitar, and this has been rubbing off on my students. They really love to move to music, so we began creating a band.

In the picture you can see our guitars, drums, saxophones, and violin. Not pictured was the didgeridoo (created during an earlier project, made from plastic pipe it worked

surprisingly well!)The children love playing with the instruments and did very well miming songs by ‘The

Who’.

 

During our ‘light and dark’ science lessons, we found that most of the class had ‘night

lights’ so we decided to make our own. Having read a story about a lighthouse keeper we made this light house

from tissue paper, glue and water.

We then put the bulb inside and created a simple switch, using

paper clips.

 

A rather more ambitious ‘night light’, created following lessons on

fairy tales. We put bulbs in each window and

made the same simple switch from paper clips.

The castle itself was made from tissue paper,

glue and water, over some plastic bottles.

 

• One of my favourite projects so far. These very large dinosaurs were created during my ‘Making Things’ club, by children from yr 1— yr 6. Lots of classes had done some work on dinosaurs and really wanted to make something that would stand out. Following an initial planning lesson, we picked our dinosaurs, using pictures from books and the internet and began making templates.

• We then made templates by adapting a small model dinosaur. The templates were then blown up by 800% and cut out. These shapes were them transferred to card where they were cut out and painted, before being assembled. These were long projects, and took a lot of figuring out! But they were well worth the effort. The hardest part was putting them up! They were made from cardboard boxes!

Our Pteradon turned out great, although getting him flying was not easy.

The T-rex looks fantastic and guards the dining hall!!

In order to encourage spelling

in Year 1, we created this

‘Spellephant’. The students copy and

stick on difficult words that they can spell. The project

has worked very well with students eager

to see how many words they stick on

the wall.

Having been looking at different places in geography, we thought it would nice to make some of the famous buildings that we had seen in books. We made small models to begin with and then started to make

them bigger and bigger. The leaning tower is the biggest so far, but we’re not finished yet.

The Coliseum. Rome

The Parthenon. Greece

Sydney Opera House. Australia

Arc de Triomphe. France

The Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Italy

Tower Bridge. U.K.

Big Ben. U.K.

The Eiffel Tower. France

We were looking at travel, in

geography. Lots of us in year 1

like trains,especially

Thomas the Tank Engine.‘All aboard the

year one express!’

• Obviously all of these projects were completed by the students and myself, and the best part of each one was the fun we had making them.

• The projects were completed by students from Year 1 – year 8.