Cuckoos News

• Friday 9 May 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 5 Week 3 What a fantastic way to celebrate VE day with our own street party on Friday! Cuckoos loved dressing up in red, white and blue and learning the Lindy Hop to dance with parents. The rest of the week we were busy making our own bluebell prints inspired by Andy Warhol’s technique and enjoyed completing our maths out in the sunshine.
• Friday 2 May 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 5 Week 2 This week, Cuckoos have loved learning about woolly mammoths as part of their instruction writing unit and with the weather warming up, enjoyed exploring capacity with water outside in the tuff trays. The highlight of the week was definitely the mini marathon though, which they all had so much fun partaking in and absolutely smashed it in the heat! Towards the end of the week, we were really treated by the morris dancers and found joining in with the traditional dancing so fun.
• Friday 25 April 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 5 Week 1 There was no better way to start the Summer Term than having Forest School and a trip to Hole Park to visit the bluebells. We loved smelling all of the different flowers and of course, admiring the beautiful bluebells, which we will be using to inspire our Andy Warhol prints in art... watch this space! We would like to say an huge thank you to the Barham family (including Petra the dog!) for welcoming us to into their home and Thomas' Dad and Iona's Mum for making the trip possible. When we returned to school, we loved creating watercolour paintings of the bluebells and then going on a dinosaur hunt at Forest school.
• Thursday 3 April 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 4 Week 6 Federation Day Fun! We had a fantastic end to our Spring Term by celebrating our new relationship with our friends in Elephant Class. We enjoyed finding out and sharing facts about ourselves, engaging in outdoor games, having fishy Friday with everyone and playing outside on their beautiful and very busy playground - the chickens and rock wall were a definite highlight! Back at Benenden, we also enjoyed taking a walk aroudn the village this week using a map with our own symbols and following a route using directional language.
• Friday 28 March 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 4 Week 5 What a fantastic week in Cuckoos. We have spent a lot of our week building up to making our own smoothies, designed using the prefernces set by our parents. We wrote about smoothie recipes, prepared fruit and finally got to share with our parents. In Maths, we have loved getting outside to measure using rulers and had a lovely afternoon sharing cream tea and creating Easter Crafts with parents on Friday.
• Sunday 23 March 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 4 Week 4 This week in Cuckoos, we enjoyed making clay fish in Art and reviewing smoothies as part of our research in DT. We also enjoyed playing with the Maths sticky dart board and bowling pins to support us in our understanding of numbers to 50, specifically counting in tens and counting one more, one less. In English, we wrote the opening and build up of our adapted versions of the book, ‘Black Dog’.
• Sunday 16 March 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 4 Week 3 Another busy week in Cuckoos. We loved preparing fruit by grating, cutting and peeling in DT. We used different techniques to shape clay in Art and enjoyed exploring our numbers to 50 through the tuff tray activities in the sunshine.
• Friday 7 March 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 4 Week 2
• Friday 28 February 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 4 Week 1 We have completed our first week back of Term 4 in Cuckoos and have been very grateful for the lovely sunshine towards the end of the week, making most of our outdoor space again. We have enjoyed tasting exotic fruits as part of our DT unit as well as starting our first dance lesson with Mrs Mileham. In Maths, we have explored subtraction within 20 using the rekenrek, number lines and a tens frame.
• Friday 7 February 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 3 Week 5 This week, Cuckoo Class went to The Maidstone Museum and took part in the toy workshops. We started by creating a human timeline of toys, looking at yoyos, skipping ropes, spinning tops, puppets and jacks. We spoek about how toys have chnaged now to become more colourful, to be able to play with friends and are mostly made of plastic. We then created our own peg dolls and enjoyed takin ga private tour of the museum afterwards. The skeleton, tudor writing stencils and the mesolithic fashion definitely featured as highlights from the trip.
• Sunday 2 February 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 3 Week 4 In Cuckoo Class, we have enjoyed continuing with our collage and got technical this week by thinking about all of the different ways we could shape materials before sticking. We loved brining the tuff trays inside for our Maths continuous provision, thinking about number sequences and counting using number lines. We have also added verbs to our understanding of word classes and went on a verb hunt around the classroom before starting to use in our own writing.
• Sunday 26 January 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 3 Week 3
• Friday 17 January 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 3 Week 2 With Forest School on Thursday, drumming on Wednesday and a visit from Mrs Reed on Friday, we had a very fun week in Cuckoos. We have also enjoyed looking at how we can move and shape our bodies in gymnastics and making collages inspired by Megan Coyle.
• Friday 10 January 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 3 Week 1 Our first week of 2025 in Cuckoo Class and the snow couldn't even stop us cracking on with lots of new learning! We loved playing dice games in Maths to think about our number bonds, using the large apparatus in PE and enjoyed writing on the tables to group data in computing. We did our first Friday show and tell and focused this week on using our key question words as well as talking with our hands away from our mouths.
• Friday 20 December 2024 Cuckoo Class Term 2 Week 7 Wow! What an amazing end to our Autumn Term. We started the week by finishing our DT Christmas cards and creating snowman art using 2D shapes. We then had the most amazing time watching Snow White at the pantomime, followed by an afternoon with our teddies for our Cuckoo Cube treat. The following day started by interviewing the Year 6s for History and then we had our Christmas Dinner, a Christmas party and a Christmas disco... I think that we were all ready for the holidays after that afternoon!
• Friday 13 December 2024 Cuckoo Class Term 2 Week 6
• Friday 6 December 2024 Cuckoo Class Term 2 Week 5 This week really felt like Christmas. We met our elf, Smarties Florence Bitsy and had so much fun exploring our new Santa’s workshop role play corner. In Maths, we continued with 3D shape, building cubes and guessing the wrapped shape and in English, we wrote stories about our cheeky elf’s arrival. Friday was definitely a day of festivities with nativity rehearsals, Santa Dash and our Christmas fayre. Thank you for all of the support we received to help put together the fantastic Christmas Bonanza.
• Friday 29 November 2024 Cuckoo Class Term 2 Week 4 This week Cuckoo Class made their own jam all ready to sell at the Christmas fayre. We loved touching, tasting and smelling the ingredients and then helping to prepare the jam but our favourite part by far was testing out the final product on toast! We have also enjoyed taking on 3D shape construction challenges and was very excited to receive a postcard from an elf, inspiring this week's writing.
• Thursday 21 November 2024 Cuckoo Class Term 2 Week 3 With the Winter fast approaching, Cuckoos made the most of one of our last Autumn welly walks on Monday. We were on the hunt for signs of Autumn and made checklists of things to look out for, the squirrels were by far our proudest spot! We have also spent lots of time doing number line work in Maths this week to help us with subtraction and started to developed our mouse skills in computing this week with a 'drag and drop' game on the chromebooks. In PE, we have been thinking about balances and how we can use our arms and our core to help us balance and finally, a huge thank you to Yala for bringing in lots of Christmas crafts for the whole class, we loved creating decorations that incorporated symbols of Christmas.
• Friday 15 November 2024 Cuckoo Class Term 2 Week 2 We started off this week in Cuckoos by joining the rest of the school outside to show our respect during the two minute silence and then joined the whole school again in the week to show our solidarity in standing up against bullying for anti-bullying week. In class, we role-played what to do when we saw someone being treated unkindly and wore our odd socks to school. Separate to this, we loved our day at Forest School making honey glue art, building fairy houses and building dens up in the trees. In RE, we retold the story of the nativity and found it very exciting in History when we explored artefacts from schools in the past.
• Friday 8 November 2024 Cuckoo Class Term 2 Week 1 Welcome back Cuckoos! This week we really threw ourselves back into the new term with a week packed full of subtraction to 10 using bowling, sensory trays and counter challenges. We wrote questions to Sunny the Meerkat in Meerkat Mail and have been developing our capital letter recognition and formation in English. In DT, we have been looking at sliding mechanisms in picture books and then had a go at creating our own slides and guides but top of our list this week, we absolutely loved welcoming so many of our parents in on Wednesday to share a PSHE lesson looking at all of the things that make us the same and different... the parachute was VERY exciting!
• Friday 25 October 2024 Cuckoo Class Term 1 Week 8
• Thursday 17 October 2024 Cuckoo Class Term 1 Week 7 Can you believe that we have nearly completed our first term in Year 1?! This week we continued to develop our knowledge of number bonds to 10, using a variety of resources both in independent play and on the carpet. We also created our final artworks inspired by Piet Mondrian and were so excited to peel off the masking tape creating the parallel lines.
• Sunday 13 October 2024 Cuckoo Class Term 1 Week 6 Cuckoos have been very creative this week in all of their subjects. We started the week with looking at physically representing our part-whole models to support us in writing number sentences to use the plus and equals symbol, some of us even tried exploring with our whole being greater than 10! In Geography, we walked up to the church collecting pictures of things on our way to record our route on a journey stick and then in Art, we explored secondary colours by mixing frozen cubes of red, blue and yellow. To finish off our week, we had the best time at The Cuckoo Kino, watching Ratatouille as our treat for earning 100 Cuckoo Cubes!
• Sunday 6 October 2024 Cuckoo Class Term 1 Week 5 Wow! This week was definitely our best yet with a whole day at Forest School making fairy houses, forest wands and counting poems. We also loved creating our own part-whole models and have started to explore split digraphs in phonics.
• Friday 27 September 2024 Cuckoo Class Term 1 Week 4
• Thursday 19 September 2024 Cuckoo Class Term 1 Week 3 We have really settled into our routine now in Cuckoo Class and have been working very hard all week. We have taken our continuous provision outside and have been engaging in Maths fluency tasks set up in the tuff trays as well as using bowling to test our understanding of one more and one less. In English, we have also used the tuff trays to help retell the story of Rosie's Walk on the farmyard and in Geography we looked at why we use maps and how a map of the big buddy playground can help us decode a secret message. With Mrs Mileham, we practiced football skills and even managed to incorporate some of our phonics words from this week into the games.
• Sunday 15 September 2024 Cuckoo Class term 1 Week 2
• Friday 6 September 2024 Cuckoo class first week back
• Saturday 6 July 2024 Cuckoos - Forest School Term 6 Our last session of the year was a BLAST!

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