Dosbarth Ash- Mrs James

Spring Term 2026

Welcome back and a Happy New Year to you all.

This term our topic is 'Bright and Brilliant: Exploring Colours and Materials.'

We will be looking at different artists including Kandinsky, Mondrian, O'Keeffe and Klee and learning about primary and secondary colours.  We will also be finding out about materials and why things are made from different materials.  We will sort, describe and label materials and conduct experiments to find out properties of different materials.

Exploring wood

As part of our materials topic we have been investigating 🪵 wood.

Today Mr Furber brought his tools into school and let us have a go. 😁

We could choose whether to saw, drill, hammer, screw or plane the wood.

🔨🪛 🪚

We listened carefully to the instructions and took care when having a go. 

What fun it was and no injuries at all 👍

Eco Fashion Show

What a fantastic fashion show Dosbarth Ash put on. It was so good they did it twice, first for their friends in Dosbarth Lime and Dosbarth Apple and then for their families.

They modelled their recycling outfits, strutting down the catwalk,  performed a Rainbow Cheer dance using their streamers they made and recited and signed a poem about colours.

What an afternoon of creativity and fun. Bendegedig 👌.

Delivering tickets and door collections

The children worked out how many tickets each class would need and delivered them ready for the show. The ticket collectors stood at the doors and counted the children in making sure they had enough tickets 😀.

Creativity Challenge - part 2

Not everybody is cut out to be a catwalk model 😁 so we held auditions to see who was going to be the models and who would be helping to design and make the outfits. 👗 👒 👕 👜 

Those who wanted to try out to be a model strutted their stuff and held a pose while the rest of the class clapped along to the music 🎵 enjoying seeing their friends perform. (And boy did they perform! 🥰)

Then the audience (those who didn’t want to be a model) discussed who they thought the best 8 models were before the announcement was made. The children were then put into groups of three, including one model and 2 designers who worked together to start the creations.

We have also been learning a colour dance which we will perform at the end of the fashion show and for this we needed to make some hand held streamers.  This could only be done with good teamwork and patience - working the cellotape cutter is not as easy as it looks!!!! 

Creativity and fun leading the way! 😍

Creativity Challenge

Yesterday Dosbarth Ash found a letter pinned to the classroom wall with a note that it was important and they needed to read it. They found out it was off Recycling Roger and Fashionable Fiona. They challenged Dosbarth Ash to be creative and make outfits out of plastic bags, paper and fabrics and then stage their own fashion show in front of Dosbarth Lime and Dosbarth Apple. They also asked them to make tickets to admit the audience and posters to advertise it.

Our first task was some maths problem solving - working out how many tickets we needed to make. We figured we needed to find out how many children were in each class. A few children were sent to ask this question along with how many adults work in the classes. The next part was if one ticket would let in 5 children how many tickets would we need per class as well as how many adult tickets if we invited Mrs Charles as well. Using 10 frames we worked out how many children tickets each class needed.  

Once we knew how many tickets we needed some of the children set about making the tickets while the remaining children had the job of creating posters to be put up around the school, all using some of our new Crayola resources. 

A great start to our creativity challenge! 👍

You may have seen the post on the schools FB page to say we have been chosen as a Global Ambassador School for Crayola.
The children in Dosbarth Ash have used some of our new resources to work collaboratively to colour a poster to celebrate the start of Creativity Week. 🎨 🖊️ 🖍️ 😁

BSL and Spanish

As part of our topic on colours Mrs Williams from the Deaf class came over to give us a lesson on the BSL signs for colours. While she was over she also went through the colours in Spanish 🇪🇸 too - using our very own expert Luis to confirm her pronunciation.

We have been exploring mixing colours and learned how to create new shades using the primary colours: red, yellow and blue. We carefully mixed the primary colours to create secondary colours and we used our new skills to make colour wheels.

Launch Day - Bright and Brilliant - exploring colours and materials

Dosbarth Ash had a great start to our new topic today.
The children all came dressed in different colours and grouped themselves and made a human rainbow. 🌈 
They then learned about the colour wheel and primary ❤️💙💛and secondary colours 💜💚🧡. They worked in pairs to see the colour wheel in action by painting one hand each in different primary colours and then rubbing their hands together to create a secondary colour.  Lots of fun and mess this morning. 🙈🙈
They also came up with ideas of where they’d like to go with their learning in this part of the new topic. Lots to look forward to. 😊

Launch Day - Bright and Brilliant - exploring colours and materials (part 2).

To start our work on materials the children all chose 1 of the items they brought in and without taking it out of their bag they had to describe it to their friends for them to guess. Lots of scientific descriptions were used including smooth, light, hard etc as well as some other descriptive clues.

Then they looked at each others items and came up with different ways they could be grouped. 

Next they discussed what they thought their items were made from and made groups based on these materials using all the objects they had brought from home.  They finally checked their work as a class and made suggestions about some needing moving and why. 

We also discussed what else we would like to find out about materials to move our learning forward.  We have a very busy term ahead of us. 😁

Summer Term 2025

As part of our transport topic Dosbarth Ash paid a visit to Hollybush Tyres garage today. They enjoyed learning about changing tyres, helped Lewis take tyres off the wheels, pressed the buttons to higher and lower the ramps and got to take a look underneath the cars.   For being such good helpers and behaving so well Lewis gave them all a chocolate cookie each. 

A big thank you to Hollybush Tyres, and in particular Lewis, for allowing us to visit and for being so good with the children.  Please support this local business when looking for new tyres. 👍

Dosbarth Ash had a special parcel delivered in the post.  When we opened it we found a pot with a lid. On closer examination the children decided the pot contained tiny caterpillars 🐛. We talked about what might happen to those caterpillars and put them in a special net basket where we can watch and observe the changes that take place. 🦋 How exciting 😁

Dosbarth Ash looked at 2 different vehicles this week, a car 🚘 and a van 🚐. They compared how they were the same and how they were different. They labelled the different parts of the vehicles and what they do, pretended they were drivers and passengers and finally all clambered into the back of the van to see if they could all fit, linking to our previous work on capacity and how much things can hold 😁.

Dosbarth Ash started work on weight today.  They were shown six blue boxes to order in terms of their weight. To begin with they predicted the big boxes would be heavy and the small boxes light.  However when they picked them up they were surprised one of the small boxes was quite heavy and some of the bigger boxes were very light. They then thought they could work out the order by looking what was inside the boxes but realised that still wouldn’t tell them which was the heaviest. Next they decided to act like a human weighing scale by holding a box in each arm and figuring out which was lighter. They kept repeating this until they agreed on an order. Finally to make sure they had ordered them correctly they used a balance scale to compare two at a time understanding that the heavier box would go down while the lighter one went up. Lots of great discussion and problem solving needed to complete this challenge! 👍

As part of our Transport topic Dosbarth Ash carried out a car park survey.  The children were given different colours to record on their clipboards and their findings were used to construct bar charts and answer questions back in class. Da iawn pawb! 👍

Dosbarth Ash have been learning about 3D shapes recently.  They have been learning to sort them, name them, make them and build with them. Lots of great learning through play. ☺️

To launch our new topic of Transport Dosbarth Ash went on a trip to Cardiff. They travelled on 2 different modes of transport bus 🚌 and boat ⛴️ and saw lots of other vehicles while out and about, including vans, double decker buses, bikes, lots of different boats and even an aeroplane flew overhead.  They enjoyed playing in the park and then ate their lunch while sailing from the Bay to Bute Park. 

Spring Term 2025

Dosbarth Ash have been discussing all the different ‘jobs’ their mothers do that they don’t get ‘paid’ for but they do simply because they love ❤️ them. They discovered mums are very clever at doing lots of things and also very busy too! 
 

To celebrate the first day of spring Dosbarth Ash went on a signs of spring walk. They found buds and pussy willows growing on the bare trees, colourful flowers 🌷 coming to bloom and frogspawn, tadpoles and a newt in the pond.
Some children were brave enough to carefully hold the frogspawn which they described as feeling soft, sticky and squishy.  When we had finished we returned them all carefully back to the pond in the hope that they’ll soon turn into frogs 🐸.

More problem solving activities from last week.
Pete the penguin was going on a picnic with his friend Penny. He had a basket full of food to share with Penny but needed help to make sure he gave half to Penny.  The children worked in small groups to half the picnic fairly.  They then chose how to record their results.  Bendegedig! 👍

Dosbarth Ash were challenged to see how fast they could make the penguins (frozen in ice) slide using the wooden frames and ramps. To begin with we had some bridges made rather than slides but they soon realised the steeper the slide the faster the penguin travelled. Great investigating and problem solving Dosbarth Ash 👍

Dosbarth Ash have been learning about halving. Today some of the children had to help Pete the Penguin 🐧 sort out his 🎒 backpack as he couldn’t go on holidays as his backpack was too full. He was told he could only take half of what he had packed.
To begin the children were randomly putting items into his backpack and hoping he’d be ok, then they started thinking what halving meant and started counting out the items so he took the same number of items as he was leaving behind but he still wasn’t allowed.  Finally they realised that to take half meant what was in the 🎒 needed to be identical to what was left behind and resorted to a one for you, one for me method. 🩳 👕🧴 🕶️ 
In the end they worked out the correct answer and Pete was able to go on holiday to meet his friend Penny. 🥰

Dosbarth Ash had great fun for World Book Day. They enjoyed lots of different book-themed activities.
They listened to the story 'Bun on the Run' on the whiteboard, they had to search through books for certain characters and write the titles of the books, they took part in a book swap with their friends and froze in different poses from Goldilocks and the Three Bears. What a fun day! 📖 📚📕

Dosbarth Ash have been working very hard on their letter formation so this week we decided to write out our Penguin poem in a handwriting competition. 🐧
Their efforts were amazing and Mrs Wood had the very difficult job of judging the winners. In the end she chose 4 winners and it turned out to be 4 girls - here they are with their poem and their prizes.
Can you believe these poems have been written by 4 and 5 year olds!!! 
Bendegedig 👏👏

Dosbarth Ash have been learning about facts and wrote some facts about penguins 🐧 including what they are, what they have and what they can do. Gwaith gwych 👏

Fun in the Valentines 💕 Disco 💃🕺

Today was Safer Internet Day and Dosbarth Ash listened to a story called The Adventures of Smartie the Penguin which was about seeing upsetting content, unreliable information and being asked for personal information while on the internet.  The children understood they should always tell an adult if something happens that they are not sure about and learnt a rhyme to help them remember.

Before you tap and click 
You should stop and think
And tell someone!

As part of Children’s Mental Health week Dosbarth Ash have been learning about different emotions. They discussed how you can often tell by someone face how they are feeling. 😁😢🫣😲😬🥰

Today the children were challenged to work in pairs to take photos of each other showing different emotions. We talked about what the different emotions meant and why they might feel this way. Then they had to take photos of their friend on the iPad, resize it to fit under the correct headings and then swap over. 

Take a look at the amazing faces they pulled and the wonderful camera work of their friends.  Da iawn Dosbarth Ash 👍

Dosbarth Ash launched their Winter Wonderland topic today. They began by showing off their wonderful penguins 🐧 they made at home.
Then they named the animals they brought in, before deciding to sort them into animals that live in hot places and animals that live in cold places.

After play Dosbarth Ash received a letter off Pete the Penguin telling them to watch the video of him in our classroom on the weekend! 
The children loved seeing how he'd popped in to see his friend on our wall. 😊

Then the children came up with a list of questions they'd like to find out about penguins which will help guide our learning this term. 🐧

This afternoon the children made habitat dioramas for hot and cold environments. We painted the backgrounds last week and then set about creating the environments and adding the animals you may find there.

We will be concentrating especially on the polar region diorama and hopefully the children will find out that as wonderful as it looks it’s not actually accurate and the children will find out why! 🐻‍❄️🐧

Autumn Term 2024

Lots of lovely Christmas craft, self portraits and writing pattern calendars, Snow Globe tree decorations and snowy houses and colourful tree cards. Hyfryd! 🎄🎅💕

Reception children have fun making Reindeer Hot Chocolate and Rice Krispie Chocolate Christmas puddings. Yum yum! 

Dosbarth Ash had a great time in their Christmas Party 🎉.

Delicious party food and lots of fun and games including pass the parcel, a boys v girls snowball fight, coloured corners and party dances. Bendegedig! 🥰🎄🎅

Dosbarth Ash have been working on number bonds and were challenged to decorate the mini Christmas trees with 5 decorations using only 2 colours. They had to work in groups to try and work out all possible combinations using their knowledge of ‘switchers’ to make sure they didn’t miss any out.
They then took this knowledge to make number bond combinations in their books.  Great problem solving Dosbarth Ash 👍.

What a fabulous morning at Dragons Den for Breakfast with Santa 🎅.
Dosbarth Ash and Dosbarth Maple and their families had lots of fun and the behaviour was amazing as always. 
 

All the children in Reception wrote a letter to Santa yesterday.  Today they walked down to the Post Office to buy a stamp to post them to him. Hopefully he’ll take note of their requests and bring them some lovely gifts in just a few weeks time. 🎅

A Snowman At Sunset - Christmas 2024

A huge thank you to Woodland Walk for their very generous donation of daffodil bulbs, pots and compost. 🥰

Dosbarth Ash enjoyed getting their hands dirty earlier this week to plant their own bulbs. Now to look after them and hope they grow. 🤞

To finish our work on senses we ended on a high with a tasting challenge!
A chocolate tasting 🍫 challenge! 😁

The tasting child was blindfolded and to make sure they couldn’t see their partner covered their eyes. Each child was then given a bowl with a square of chocolate in it - either white chocolate or milk chocolate and was asked to guess whether it was brown or white chocolate.  

Guess what - most of them guessed correctly ✅.

Dosbarth Ash learnt how to make their own salt dough.  They mixed the ingredients together, rolled it out and used our Pudsey cookie cutter to cut the shape.  After they had been cooked they painted them yellow and added the spotty patch. 

As part of ant-bullying week Dosbarth Ash looked at how mean words can make us feel. The children found 2 sad children ☹️ in our class and were told they were looking sad because some children had been saying mean things to them. 
The children ‘pretended’ to be unkind and shouted mean things at them. Each time they said something mean we cut part of their body to show how those words can hurt. They then discussed how we could make them feel better and decided they could say kind words instead. We wrote those kind words on hearts 💕and used the hearts to cover the mean words and stick the body back together.
However, they still had sad faces so this is where the magic came in. 🥰 The children closed their eyes and chanted “Turn your frown upside down” three times and were amazed and delighted when they opened their eyes to find they had managed to turn those frowns upside down and they were now looking very happy. 😁
What kind children we have in Dosbarth Ash 💖.

November 13th was World Kindness Day.
Today Dosbarth Ash talked about different ways we can be kind to each other. We decided to pay a compliment to a friend. In pairs the children told their partner what they liked about them and we made them into simple compliment bracelets. Have a read of all the lovely things they said. 😍

My partner told me I was smiley 😃 - he must have caught me on a good day 🤣🤣🥰.

Bonfire night fun making sticky, chocolate edible sparklers. Flasus iawn 😋.

More outdoor learning this week - with an outdoor number hunt and autumn scavenger hunt. 👍

As part of Outdoor Learning Week Dosbarth Ash took some of their learning outdoors. They created large scale bonfire and fireworks pictures made from bottle tops. They discussed the shapes they would take and the sounds they would make and created human firework shapes for the final photo. 
Gwaith da iawn! 🎆🎇

As part of their work on senses Dosbarth Ash have also been thinking about people who cannot hear properly and what issues they might face. 👂

We have played lots of listening games to develop our listening skills including guess and match the instrument, where they had to listen to an instrument being played out of their sight and then find the matching instrument and play the rhythm back. 
We finished that session by becoming a ‘marching band’ -  trying to keep the beat while marching to a song.

Dosbarth Ash have also been showing off their listening skills by completing our “Listening Eggs Challenge 👂”.
They had to shake the eggs and match what they thought was inside making the noise.
When everyone had made their guesses they had to self assess their answers by checking what was inside.
Gwaith gwych! 👍

Dosbarth Ash have started learning about their senses. 
👀👃👅👂✋
They started by thinking about people who cannot see and what difficulties they may come across.
They completed an obstacle course while being able to see where they were going and then did it blindfolded with their friend acting as a ‘guide’ to help them get around.  They watched an animated video about ‘Pip’ who wanted to become a guide dog.

Today was Show Racism the Red Card ♦️day.

Dosbarth Ash looked at a story about how everyone is different and how that is ok.  They discussed similarities and differences between themselves and their friends and learned that we should never make fun of people or call them names if they are different to us. They learned that having differences makes us special 💕.

Listen to their video to see how they are all different but they are all friends 👫👭👬.

As part of Dydd Shwmae 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 some children from Year 6 came over to show Dosbarth Ash how to play some fun Welsh apps on the IPads.
 Hwyl dda! 👍

Dosbarth Ash have started learning their flashcards as we begin their journey to learning to read. 📚 
They have made a great start and we ‘read’ our first book together this week as well as playing splat the word and read and keep the star 🌟.

Dosbarth Ash start their morning with a Question of the Day? 
We are using a ten frame to help us work out how many children say yes 👍and no 👎 quickly without having to count every photo.  A different morning maths problem every day to start our days and develop our understanding of 10 frames 👏.

Dosbarth Ash have been talking about their homes and the people who live in them.  They created a house front with a roof, a door and some windows which then opened up to reveal who lives in their 🏠 house.
Great work everyone 👏

Dosbarth Ash have made a great start with our phonics scheme, RWI.
They are trying hard to recognise and say the sounds we have learnt and have practiced forming them correctly using shaving foam and white boards. They’ve also been sorting objects and pictures based on their initial sounds. What a great start on their journey to learn to read and write. 👍

Autumn Leaves Song

Dosbarth Ash have been learning about Autumn.  They have learned about the leaves changing colour and what some animals do to get ready for Autumn. They went to see if they could find Piglet our resident hedgehog in his little house but although he wasn’t around they could see his special station where he gets fed and understood we mustn’t touch his home.

We are going on a Bear Hunt yoga. Great flexibility, movement and control. 👍

As part of our baseline assessment we like to check what the children’s pencil control and grip looks like. Here you can see the children creating writing patterns and mark making as well as learning to draw themselves. We love this activity every year as it’s great to show progression throughout the year. 👍😊x

More fun and learning based on our work around birthdays 🎁🎉.
The children have been learning about months of the year and when their own birthdays are, they decorated party hats to use on our wall display, had circle time discussions about what makes a good party, and drew and painted their ideas 🎁🎈🛍🎂🥤and enjoyed playing in our party role party area. 🥰

What’s been happening in Dosbarth Ash? 
Lots of name recognition, ordering the letters and learning what sounds our names start with and include. 

Subitising (say what you see) for numbers to 5 - without counting and sorting into groups. Beat the answers - rapid recall and recognising amounts and categorising.

Fun in the sun, playing with friends and developing those gross motor skills. Busy, busy 😊.

Great start to our launch day. 😊
Mrs Charles came to class with a letter from Penny the Postwoman and a bag of presents without tags. 
Penny wanted the children to work out who the presents belonged to as the tags had fallen off in her bag. The children thought at first that the biggest presents should go to the biggest people but then we thought about big presents that ‘little’ people might have. 
Next they thought we should have a feel of the presents to see if that helped but although it brought lots of lovely guesses ‘This is definitely a book,’ ‘I think this is a mask/truck/teddy’ and descriptive words like squishy, hard, pointy, it didn’t really help them know who to give the presents to. 
In the end they decided the only way to be sure would be to open the presents so after a quick game of pass the parcel they opened the presents and discussed who should have what. After planning to give the cap to the little boy who was 5, we tested it on one of the children and decided maybe it would be better off for the dad as it was too big! Lots of great problem solving and discussion and 5 happy people reunited with their presents 😁.

For the next challenge the children had to find their own birthday photo and sit next to it.

They then had to look for clues to find out which birthday it was and match it to the numbers on the floor. Some children counted the candles on their cakes, or spotted numbers on balloons, badges or their clothes and others looked to see if they looked the same as they do now or whether they were from when they were ‘babies’. More great discussions about how we change over time. 👍

Summer Term 2024

What a lovely day for our Bug Party! 🥰
We started by watching the Yr 6 leavers show. 👏 Seems like only yesterday they were in Reception. 😳
Then we made Hungry Caterpillar 🐛 necklaces practising our cutting and threading skills.
We ate our lovely lunch plates outside while wearing our bug headbands.

We played lots of fun games like Bug Corners 🦋🐛🐝🐞, Blindfolded pin the bee🐝 in his hive, obstacle Bug race and our favourite one,  find and eat the worm (hidden in squirty cream)😁.

We ate our sticky and sickly butterfly doughnuts with a much needed drink 😋 and ended the day with some Bug Yoga.

Llawer o hwyl - lots of fun. 🎉🎉

Dosbarth Ash enjoyed preparing for our “Bug Party” tomorrow by making their Doughnut Butterflies 🦋.

They had to cut their ring doughnut in half to make wings, mix up their own coloured icing to spread onto their wings, decorate and add chocolate antennae. Then we popped them into the fridge to set ready for an afternoon treat tomorrow. Yum, yum! 😋

The rain might have cancelled Sports Day outdoors but it didn’t spoil the race fun indoors. 

Dosbarth Ash have been practising their hold a sentence skills today. The children were given a random letter vest then told a sentence they needed to create out of the letters. They had to spell out the sentence and arrange themselves in the correct order deciding where the finger spaces and a capital letter needed to come.  Good thinking, spelling and sequencing skills in action 👍.

What a wonderful day at Parc Play 🥰.
From the moment they got there they started asking for their lunch until we gave in at 11.40am 🤣 but they had such a fab day, running, climbing, jumping, building, laughing and enjoying playing with their friends as well as an ice cream to cool them down. Their behaviour was excellent and their smiles said it all but a lot of them complained they were sooooo tired 😴😴when we got back 🤣x

Over the last month Dosbarth Ash have been excited to follow the journey of our teeny tiny caterpillars 🐛 through to them becoming beautiful butterflies 🦋. Today we tried to set them free. 💕
2 of them flew off happily as soon as we let them out but 2 seemed to be struggling a bit to get off the ground so we made the decision to put them back into our butterfly garden and take them back inside for another day or two. We will continue to feed them nectar and hopefully they’ll build up enough strength to fly off and meet up with their friends in another day or two. What an exciting day we’ve had today. 🥰

Dosbarth Ash enjoyed their afternoon of pond dipping. They found lots of newts and a few diving beetles but unfortunately the frogs had decided to hide from us today. 😊

Dosbarth Ash are enjoying learning about butterflies 🦋and watching the changes taking places with our own caterpillars. 🐛
This week they have made life cycles by first cutting out some leaf shapes, 🍃then mixing paint 🎨to make different shades of green, then ordering the pasta to look like each of the stages and finally labelling them. Great job Dosbarth Ash 😁

Dosbarth Ash have been learning about halving this week. 
Teddy was going on holiday but he packed too much in his backpack and was told he had to half everything in his backpack to make it light enough to travel. The children suggested many ideas before finally realising the best method. Lots of good discussions, mistakes and problem solving to work it out. They’ve also worked on halving numbers using counters and a split plate to work out the answers. 👍

Last week was all about 3D shapes in Dosbarth Ash. 🌏🥫🍦🎲🗃
We began the week by simply sorting lots of 3D boxes and containers without even knowing their names. Then each child picked one item each without knowing what for before being challenged in a small group to build the tallest tower which led to us discussing which shapes are best for building and which ones aren’t. 
We then learnt the proper names for the shapes and tried to make our own using various classroom resources. The resilience and perseverance needed to make them using lollipop sticks or matchsticks and play dough was simply too much for some but they all had a really good go. Da iawn Dosbarth Ash 👏👏.

Dosbarth Ash acted out the life cycle of a Butterfly 🥚 🐛 🦋 imaging themselves in the different stages. Then they played a mirroring game where they had to mirror their partners movements working in time together. 👍

Dosbarth Ash wrote their own Butterfly Poems this week. 🦋
They brainstormed lots of verbs to describe how butterflies move and adjectives to describe how they look before picking their favourites to compose their own poems.  Gwaith gwych 👏💕

Dosbarth Ash have been reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar 🐛 this week and have enjoyed the activities we have been doing. They have done step by step drawings of the Very Hungry Caterpillar 🐛 and some of the fruits he ate 🍎🍐🍊🍓🍉, completed floor and table top jigsaw puzzles, made caterpillars and butterflies from play dough and made fruit from Lego.  We’ve also learnt about the life cycle of a butterfly 🦋and what better way to learn about it but to see it first hand 😄. Our caterpillars arrived this week and we are looking forward to watching the changes take place until they turn into beautiful butterflies and we release them into the wild. 🤞

🌸🌼🌻Bottle top flowers 🌸🌼🌻
Dosbarth Ash used what they have learnt about the different parts of a flower to create their own bottle top flowers. They were able to choose whether to work individually, in pairs or small groups to produce their flowers. Beautiful 💕

🐝 Monday was World Bee Day 🐝
Dosbarth Ash have found out lots of facts about bees and why they are so important to us. They have learnt about how bees make honey and the life cycle of bees and did an amazing step by step drawing of a bee. Let’s not forget these artists are only 4 or 5 years old. 😁
Gwaith da! 👍

Dosbarth Ash had great fun on their word hunt today. 
In pairs the children had to find 10 numbered clue cards. On each card was a teeny tiny word 😁. The children used magnifying glasses 🔎 to read each word and then wrote it on their sheets next to the number of the clue.
When they found all 10 clue cards, the words they found formed a sentence which they had to read back to me. Super team work and reading skills and lots of movement and fun in the sunshine. Ardderchog! 👏👏

Dosbarth Ash had lots of fun celebrating Seren a Sbarc day. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
Older pupils from Criw Cymraeg came to work with the children to encourage them to use more Welsh by showing them Welsh apps, teaching them a Welsh song and playing Welsh games. Llawer o hwyl! Gwych 😁

Dosbarth Ash planted their own sunflower 🌻 seeds last week. They made covers for their pots, collected stones for the base, topped up with compost and planted their seeds. They then chose where they wanted to put their pots before watering them. Now to look after them and wait to see whose will grow the tallest 🤞.

Dosbarth Ash have enjoyed using a large scale construction kit in the sunshine this week. They have worked together to make shops, towers, boats and houses showing good problem solving and resilience to create their ideas. Gwych 👍

As part of our topic Sunshine and Sunflowers Dosbarth Ash have been looking at Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting. 🌻
They decided to create their own vase of flowers and were able to choose from various mediums including pastels, water colours, paint, crayons as well as cutting, sticking, glittering and collaging.  They all showed great concentration and resilience to complete their masterpiece and we love how different they all look. Gwaith hyfryd 🌻💕

Dosbarth Ash have been practising reading and writing phonic phrases and spelling high frequency words this week. 
In pairs the children had to read the phrases on the their partners hat to them for them to then write independently. 
To practise spelling high frequency words the children had to roll a dice, match it to the key words and write out the correct spelling using the correct colour pen.
You can tell they are almost at the end of their time in Reception. 👍

Dosbarth Ash were challenged to go on a scavenger hunt looking for different criteria eg something soft, something colourful etc. In pairs they had to take photos of their partner when they found an item and then upload them to their Seesaw account and resize them to fit into the appropriate boxes. Great partner work - gwych 😊

After our visit to Woodland Walk Garden Centre we have planted the 3 strawberry plants donated to us along with some mixed herbs including basil, rocket, parsley and coriander.  We will now need to take care of them, watch the changes and hopefully have some sweet strawberries to enjoy. 😊

Dosbarth Ash have enjoyed taking some of their maths learning outside this week. They have been making predictions of higher or lower while playing ‘Play your cards right’ and been practising number bonds and oral addition while trying to throw their beanbags into the hoops. Lots of fun and learning outdoors 😊

To launch our new topic ‘Sunflowers and Sunshine’ Dosbarth Ash went to visit Woodland Walk Garden Centre.
We had a lovely time wandering around learning about all the different plants, trees and garden essentials they sell. Scott and Megan showed us the different poly tunnels and the potting room where all the work goes on. We used our senses to look at 👀, smell 👃and touch 🖐 lots of different plants and Scott gave us 3 different varieties of strawberries to plant and grow back at school. We can’t wait to see them grow and then use our sense of taste 👅to see which we prefer. 

Woodland Walk is a lovely place to visit and just on our doorstep. How lucky are we? 🥰 @WalkWoodland

Dosbarth Ash enjoyed working with the parachute yesterday. 
They showed great teamwork, listening and problem solving skills to move the ball around the parachute without letting it roll off, bouncing the parachute to get all the balls off, swapping places under the parachute and crawling underneath in our crocodile game.
Lots of fun and laughter 😆😁🤣

Spring Term 2024

Dosbarth Ash have been learning about money, so this week they were given some pennies and invited to spend them in the Easter ‘toppings’ shop.  They had to work out how much they could buy  and swap their pennies for treats to decorate their cakes for Easter. 
Fun, maths and chocolate! Perfect combination 😁

As part of BSL week Dosbarth Ash have learnt to say and sign a poem about penguins 🐧. They did an amazing job 👌

We also used the poem to have a handwriting competition. 🏆
The children were encouraged to make sure their tall letters were tall and the short letters were short, to make sure they sat on the lines and to remember finger spaces. The concentration and effort was excellent and every one of them tried their best.  😊
It was a very difficult job to pick the winners but the 5 children chosen were rewarded with a pencil and rubber to keep up the good work at home. Da iawn Dosbarth Ash 👏👏

Dosbarth Ash are enjoying learning about penguins 🐧.
They have found out lots of facts about them, enjoyed playing with mini penguins in the ice, drawn step by step penguins and painted half a penguin to create symmetrical penguins. Busy, busy 😁

Dosbarth Ash have been talking about all the ‘jobs’ mothers do that they don’t actually get paid for but do simply because they love them 💕.
Have a listen to their thoughts 😊

We have been learning about Capacity in Dosbarth Ash. 
After lots of practical exploration using cubes, sand and lentils they were given 5 small containers and challenged to see which would hold the most. To begin they predicted which container would hold the most and lots picked the tall, thin cylinder. Then they discussed how they could find out whether their predictions were correct. Initially they decided to fill all the containers with water but soon discovered that didn’t really tell them anything. 🤷‍♀️After more discussions they realised they needed to fill one container and then pour the water from that one into another one to see if it held more or less. Some of the children were able to explain “If I pour this in and it runs over the top this one must hold more than the container I’m pouring into but if there’s still room when I’ve poured it all in this one must hold less.” 
By the end we discovered the tall, thin cylinder actually held the least amount of water. 😮
Very impressive observations Dosbarth Ash 👍.

Some of the children are getting super confident at spelling CVC words independently. They worked in groups to write as many cvc words as they could and some of them even tried to put them in simple sentences. Da iawn pawb 👏.

What a busy World Book Day 📚

The children had great fun picking out their new book from our book swap and then spent time looking through them. 🥰

They did a character and setting scavenger hunt where they were challenged to look through lots of different books to find characters in the stories. They also had a spot the flashcard challenge where they had to find some of their flashcard words in pages from one of our Penguin books and of course they listened to lots of lovely stories. Dydd arbennig! 👍

Dosbarth Ash enjoyed our celebrations for Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant and did a super job singing their two Welsh songs. Ardderchog! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Dosbarth Ash were excited to receive a letter today from Pete the penguin 🐧 telling them he had visited the classroom. They were even more excited when they saw 2 videos of him in the classroom 😆.

They had a discussion about what they already know about penguins and a list of questions they’d like to find the answers to. They then enjoyed sliding the penguins over the blocks of ice and helping them swim in the water as the ice melted throughout the day. Lots of interesting vocabulary as they explored the penguins and the ice. 🥶Gwych!

What a creative bunch Dosbarth Ash and their families are!  Look at these wonderful penguins they made at home as part of a home task over half term. Gwych 🐧.

As part of Children’s Mental Health Week Dosbarth Ash were talking about how we can manage some of our emotions. We looked at breathing techniques, using music and created our own calm down sensory bottles. The children enjoyed choosing items, colours and liquids to create their own bottles and every one was different and unique. Check our the videos on the last page to see how they work. 
Hopefully the children will take on ideas when their emotions are heightened to help themselves calm down. 🤞

Dosbarth Ash have been finding out about weighing and mass this week. They have been learning to compare two objects, find objects that weigh more or less than an object and use non-standard measures to find out how heavy objects are. Lots of predicting and testing their ideas and using the correct vocabulary. Da iawn pawb 👍

As part of our topic ‘A Starry Night’ Dosbarth Ash looked at a famous painting of the same name by Vincent Van Goch.  They were challenged to create their own version by each completing one part of the painting and choosing any medium to fill it in.  They could choose between crayons, felt pens, pastels, paints or water colours to complete their section.
Then they had to work together to put it back together to complete the final picture. We think it looks pretty special. 👍💕Don’t you agree?

Dosbarth Ash have been learning about sequencing, ordering and routines and the language associated with it. They have been able to sequence their own routines and correct sequences that have been ordered incorrectly.
Gwaith da Dosbarth Ash 👏

Dosbarth Ash enjoyed some winter sunshine this week by getting outdoors to explore. As part of our topic we were delighted to spot both the sun ☀️ and the moon 🌙 in the sky at the same time. We talked about the importance of never looking directly at the sun but enjoyed the feel of it on our faces. We compared the trees to how they looked in the autumn and how they are no longer a good hiding place.
We also found the pond was frozen over and then found some ice inside the large tyres. Finally we looked at how the sun makes shadows and had fun trying to create different shaped shadows with our bodies 😊

Dosbarth Ash had a great start to their topic ‘A Starry Night’ today by coming to school dressed for bed. 🛏
They enjoyed showing their favourite bedtime story books 📚  and teddies 🧸 to their friends, acting out bedtime routines, learning a lullaby, comparing day ☀️and night 🌙 and snuggling down for a giant sleepover. 
What a great start 😊.

Autumn Term 2023

Welcome to Dosbarth Ash class page. We are delighted to welcome your children to our class and are looking forward to see how they grow and learn this year. 

Regular updates will be posted on here so you can keep up to date on what they are learning and what is happening in our classroom.

What a busy, enjoyable day we’ve had in Dosbarth Ash. 😁
Party food lunch followed by lots of fun and games including a boys vs girls snowball fight, pass the parcel, dancing, musical statues/bumps and corners game. 
Phew! No wonder Mrs Wood and I are so tired. 🤪

2 more days to go 🎉🎉

Dosbarth Ash were challenged to decorate 5 miniature Christmas trees today BUT ......... they could only use 2 colour baubles and each tree could only have 4 baubles. The children had to work together to work out all possible combinations. It took a lot of trial and error and discussions to figure out the different combinations but they got there in the end showing great resilience. 👏👏

After working up an appetite completing their Reindeer Run, Dosbarth Ash enjoyed a tasty Christmas Dinner today. Blasus iawn 🥰

Dosbarth Ash completed their sponsored Reindeer Run today.  
Da iawn pawb. 👏

Lots of fun and laughter with their friends and a visit from Santa 🎅🏼today. #Christmasiscoming 💕

After another amazing concert today Dosbarth Ash wrote a letter to Santa. They had to tick if they had been nice, naughty or both and it was great to see how many ticked both 🤣🤣.
They then walked down to the Post Office to buy a stamp to post it to the North Pole. Here’s hoping he brings all their requests.

Dosbarth Ash were simply amazing in their concert Nursery Rhyme Nativity today. They acted, spoke and sung their little hearts out and Mrs Wood and I were so proud of each and every one of them. Let’s hope tomorrow’s performance is just as good. What a great start to our Christmas celebrations 🎅🏼🎄.

Dosbarth Ash learnt how to make their own salt dough this week which they then used to roll out, cut and paint to create their own fabulous Pudsey Bears just in time for Children in Need day.
Gwaith arbennig! 😊

As part of ant-bullying week Dosbarth Ash looked at how mean words can make us feel. The children found Sad Simon and Grumpy Greta ☹️ in our class and were told they were looking sad because some children had been saying mean things to them. 
The children ‘pretended’ to be unkind and shouted mean things at them. Each time they said something mean we cut part of their body to show how those words can hurt. They then discussed how we could make Simon and Greta feel better and decided they could say kind words instead. We wrote those kind words on hearts 💕and used the hearts to cover the mean words and stick the body back together.
However, Simon and Greta still had sad faces so this is where the magic came in. 🥰 The children closed their eyes and chanted “Turn your frown upside down” three times and were amazed and delighted when they opened their eyes to find Smiling Simon and Grinning Greta looking very happy. 😁
What kind children we have in Dosbarth Ash 💖.

Today is World Kindness day so Dosbarth Ash discussed ways we could be kind to others. 💕
They had lots of great ideas so we decided to do 2 activities - one involving a little gift and one that was absolutely free but made people just as happy. 

First we visited all the classrooms and offices in the school wishing all the staff a Happy Kindness Day and offering them a little chocolate treat. 😁

Then we thought of nice things we could say to our friends and everyone had to pay their partner a compliment. We used those compliments to make and decorate a compliment bracelet that we presented to our friends to wear home.  What a lovely day - filled with lots of smiles and love 🥰x

Dosbarth Ash made some poppies for Remembrance Day. First they had to mix different shades of red, then they painted some coffee filters before cutting them into petals which they swapped with their friends to get a mix of colours. Finally they rearranged the petals back into a poppy shape. How beautiful do they look. 💕

As part of outdoor learning week Dosbarth Ash had fun making a Conker Man. They needed good hand eye coordination to thread their leaves on to the sticks and good reactions to run and shelter amongst the trees every time the heavens opened ☔️☔️🥴

Dosbarth Ash enjoyed some teamwork in the fresh air this afternoon when they worked as a group to create a large scale face made from bottle tops. They worked together to make some funny faces and did a great job of sorting them back into colours when it was time to pack away.
Gwaith gwych 👏👏

Dosbarth Ash have been split into 3 groups, hedgehogs🦔, owls 🦉and squirrels 🐿 to complete different activities. They have learnt lots of facts about them, learnt how to say their names in Welsh and how to use sign language to say the animal names. They’ve also looked at autumn 🍂🍁and the changes that take place and had lots of fun being creative to make our beautiful autumn display. What a busy 8 weeks we’ve had. 😊

After listening to the story Leaf Man Dosbarth Ash decided to create their own leaf people and animals. Can you spot a hedgehog, cat and lion amongst their marvellous creations? 😁

After our listening eggs and our feely balloons, today was all about our smelly pots! 👃
The children had to use their sense of smell to sniff the pots and guess the fruit inside. A bit difficult for some with their coughs and colds 🥴

Using our sense of sight to do some good looking 👀when going on a number hunt for the numbers 1-3.  Super spotting Dosbarth Ash 👏

This weeks senses work was our ‘feely balloon’ activity. The children used their sense of touch to work out what was inside each of the balloons. Lots of great words about what they could feel like spiky, soft, squishy, hard and ‘nothing’ for shampoo! Da iawn pawb! 😊

Dosbarth Ash enjoyed the autumn sunshine yesterday to collect some autumn treasures and experiment with the different sounds they could make by tapping, scraping and banging a stick on different materials around the school grounds. 😊

More work on our senses in Dosbarth Ash. The children thought about how lucky they are to be able to see all the beautiful things around us. We then discussed how blind people would find many things we take for granted difficult and did some activities blindfolded. First they drew a step by step picture of an owl while being able to see and then they tried the same drawing listening to the instructions but blindfolded. There was lots of laughter and discussion when they saw their ‘blind drawings’. 

Then they watched an animation about a puppy wanting to be a guide dog and how they are used to help blind people get around safely. After that an obstacle course was set up and they took it in turns to be both the ‘blind’ person and the guide dog leading them around safely and warning them of dangers in their way.  Great communication and trust formed and an appreciation of how lucky we all are to be able to see. 😊

More work on our senses in Dosbarth Ash. This time it was our sense of smell and sorting smells into nice smells 🥰 and ‘not so nice’ ones 🤢.
Luckily they were only pictures and not actual bad smells 😁

Dosbarth Ash are learning about their senses. 👀👂👃👅🤲
This week we’ve been doing lots of listening activities including matching the instrument sounds, sound lotto, Fred talking words and listening eggs.
In the listening eggs activity they had to shake the eggs, listen carefully and match the egg to the object they though was inside making the sounds. We’ll be checking the contents this week to see if their listening skills were correct. 😊

Getting those finger muscles working again today with lots of rollling, squashing, squeezing and pinching. We finished off by trying to form the initial letters of their names and what a great job they did of it. Gwych! 😊

Dosbarth Ash used their repeating pattern names to explore how many letters they have in their names and sort themselves into groups. They also looked at whose name started with the same sound and how many of them had certain letters in their names. They are getting great at recognising their names and the order of the letters in them. Bendegedig! 😊

Dosbarth Ash were challenged with recognising their own front doors and learning what number or name was on their doors. We then looked at who had the smallest and largest numbers on their doors and who lived in a house with the same number as their friend. Lots of good observation and practice at reading different numbers. 😊

Dosbarth Ash have been working on recognising and ordering the letters in their names. They also got their finger muscles going by peeling stickers to make a repeating pattern of colours to form their names. 😊

Dosbarth Ash have been talking about the beauty of autumn and all the wonderful colours it brings. They found lots of these autumn treasures and used them to create autumn rainbows. Don’t they look wonderful! 🥰

Our first day went well with not a tear in sight. Let’s hope that continues and we have lots of fun and learning this year. 😊

Summer Term 2023

And it’s summer term already! Where has the time gone? I bet you are seeing a difference in your child now and how much they have learnt and grown up.

This term our topic is called ‘Step back in time’ and we will be looking at ‘then’ and ‘now’ including the children themselves and looking at home, school, shopping and transport in the past. We will use the wonderful book ‘Peepo’ by Janet and Allan Ahlberg to inspire some of our written work.  We will be visiting St. Fagan’s to do a Beti Bwt Washday session as well as looking at the old houses, school and shops. We will continue to work on our reading and simple spelling skills and encourage the children to ‘have a go’ at writing simple sentences themselves. We will also continue with our number work and look at the value of bigger numbers and experiment with number bonds and patterns.

Dosbarth Ash enjoyed their Farm Party.
Here’s part one - animal photos 🐮🐴🐷

Part 2 of the Farm Party
Picnic lunch, 
Chicken race - don’t crack the egg
And Sheep shearing 😊

Dosbarth Ash started preparations for our Farm Party today by decorating cupcakes to look like farm animals.  The concentration and effort they took to roll out the icing, cut into shapes and decorate to look like cows 🐮 sheep  🐑 and pigs 🐷 was amazing. They are looking forward to eating them at our party tomorrow. 😁

Dosbarth Ash have been working very hard on learning their number bonds to 10.
They enjoyed using the Numicon to work out lots of different ways of making 10.
Gwaith gwych! 👍

When Dosbarth Ash took part in Beti Bwt’s Washday, Beti told them how long ago the children didn’t have many toys and used to use their mothers dolly pegs to create their own doll characters. Dosbarth Ash decided to create their own dolly peg characters and what a wonderful job they made of them. They researched, discussed and chose their own characters and as you can see we had  some mermaids 🧜‍♀️ angels 👼 fairies 🧚‍♀️ dancers 💃 superheroes 🦸‍♂️ ninja’s, 2 Santa’s🎅🏼 and a King’s Guard 💂‍♂️.