Week 6

This week celebrated Safer Internet Day and after an assembly led by Mrs Fennell, the children came back to class and we looked at how technology has changed though time. The children were amazed to learn about how gaming consoles have changed over the decades and to see how computers have evolved. 

Later in the week, the children moved on to counting in 2s. They used a large number line to count in jumps of 2 and used items from their maths toolboxes to show the jumps using pairs of objects. The children also practised counting in 2s forwards and backwards and from different numbers. 

To start the week off in maths, the children found quarters of shapes. They learnt that a quarter is one of four equal parts of the whole. They learnt that in order to be a fraction of a shape, it has to be one of a number of EQUAL parts. They carefully cut out and folded a square, a circle and a rectangle into quarters and labelled each of the equal parts with 1/4.

This week in games, the children continued to improve their bat and ball skills! They used their eyes and bodies together to keep control of the ball using their bats.

This week, we thought about which of the four counties of the United Kingdom that we would like to live the most. Some children chose Wales because of its beautiful rivers and national parks. Some children chose Scotland for its incredible mountains and beautiful national parks and Northern Ireland for its busy, vibrant capital city of Belfast but most children chosen England which has a bit of everything including many seaside resorts! 

Lots of fun was had again this week in DT! The second group had the chance to use the woodwork station to build their bridges in pairs and then all the children were able to decorate their creations too. They worked incredibly well together, taking turns, listening to each other’s ideas and considering carefully how to solve problems as they went along showing resilience and courage. They then evaluated their work really well by considering not only their successes but also what didn’t go to plan and how they overcame these issues. They finished feeling very proud of themselves

We started off our week of writing by generating adjectives to describe the food that the tiger ate when he came to tea. The children first identified the nouns (in this case the foods in the pictures) and then used their own adjectives, as well as those words given to them, to describe the textures, colours, tastes and smells of the foods. 

Week 5

This children really enjoyed building bridges this week. Half the class had the opportunity to use wood this week whilst the other half used construction kits including Lego. Next week, we will swap! The goats made it across lots of successful bridges today!

We compared mass in maths this week and used the language of heaviest and lightest to describe the boxes. After using our hands to compare the boxes, we decided a more accurate way was in order and so used the balancing scales. 

The children built their toy aeroplanes today using paper, card and foil. They considered how they would be making a fair test and made sure that they all built the planes to the same design, used the same size piece of material to fold into a plane and launched their planes from the same place. The children did 3 tests for each plane to get a clearer picture of which plane was the most effective. We then observed the results by looking to see which plane flew the furthest in each test. 

When the police officers visited this week, the children were very excited! They really enjoyed holding a pair of handcuffs and sitting in the police car! 

Week 4

In gymnastics the children travelled around the room in between the apparels in ‘bouncy’ ways and then when they arrived at some equipment, they created a balance with their points and patches (small and large body parts). We talked about keeping our muscles strong, pointing our toes and stretching our arms and legs when balancing. 

Lots of fun was had in adventure time this week. For our maths challenge, the children were practising partitioning teen numbers into tens and ones and showing this using cubes, arrow cards cherry models and bar models. The children created a cartoon strip of their recently learnt story  - ‘The man on the moon’ to earn their green stick for their writing task. They practised tricky words on the easels using our colourful whiteboard pens and chalks (our class present from the PTA) earning them an orange stick and they practised their dribbling skills using a bat and ball in our outside area for a yellow stick. The children thoroughly enjoyed making bridges using paper to earn their red stick too. Many children earnt all of their sticks this week and received their stickers and golden ticket! Well done Turtle class. 🌟

We started a new learning journey this week in writing, which will see the children writing a noisy poem next week, which will be shared with the Dolphin class when finished. This learning journey has been driven by the text, ‘Peace at last’ by Jill Murphy. Earlier in the week, the children acted out the story and spent time thinking about the nouns in the story and adjectives to describe them. They also thought about all the noisy words in the book and created a word bank of them to use in their poems.

The children loved building their bridge to get the Gruff family safely over the trolls den. Once built, the children tested their bridges to see if they could hold a toy goat on top! The children were brilliant at adapting their designs to make them stronger and they were so excited to see their bridges successfully holding a toy goat on top! 🌟

We used bats to control balls this week in our games lesson. The children practised holding the bat flat and strong in order to bounce the ball on the top of it. They practised bouncing the ball on the floor and catching it too. 

This week we learnt all about the features of Scotland! We learnt that it has a capital city called Edinburgh and that, although it tends to be colder in Scotland than where we live in England, it is a beautiful country with enormous mountains, beautiful rivers, busy cities and protected national parks. It also has some busy ports! 

Week 3

The children used plastic bats this week in games to move the balls around the playground and around objects. They worked hard to keep control of their ball.

The children learnt about some of the organs inside their bodies this week in PSHE. They learnt the names of these organs and where they can be found inside our bodies and stuck them accordingly within the outline of the person on their posters.

This week, the children worked really hard to complete their adventure time challenges! Their aim is to complete the 5 main tasks over the week. When they’ve completed a task, they collect a coloured lolly stick which they place in their very own named paper cup. If they complete all 5 challenges by Friday, they get awarded a golden ticket and 3 stickers! 

In gymnastics this week, we were thinking about our ‘patches’ or large body parts. We used these body parts to take our weight in various balances! The children also thought about what their legs, feet, arms and hands were doing and made sure they had pointed toes, strong, tight muscles to keep their limbs still and cupped stretched hands. 

At the start of this week, we were thinking about the number facts, both addition and subtraction, that linked to the number bonds to 9 and 10. The children represented these bonds as cherry models, bar models, tens frames and number sentences. They worked so hard! Then today, we began some learning about teen numbers. Next week we will be using arrow cards too to represent the teen numbers and we will be doing some investigating using one step word problems!

This week in Geography, we thought about England! We looked at some of the rivers, mountains, cities, ports, national parks and seaside resorts that we have across the country!

In computing, we were using backspace to deleted unwanted text, caps lock to create capital letters and the arrow keys to navigate around the page.

The Turtle class really enjoyed sorting through and classifying the different materials in science this week. They thought about what the materials were, their properties and whether or not they would be good for making a toy aeroplane from. The children found it fascinating that a tin can and tin foil were both made of metal and that tin foil could potentially be used to make a toy aeroplane because of its properties! 

Week 2

In maths this week, we have been using cherry models and bar models to show our number bonds to 10. We have been working systematically and using our maths toolboxes to do so.

In writing, we used the traffic light colours to identify words that the children knew well, words that they had heard of before but which they didn’t know how to use and words that were completely unfamiliar with. We talked about the meanings of these words and practised using them in sentences about the text.

In geography we learnt about the different features of the United Kingdom. The children discovered that the UK has the following features: mountains, rivers, national parks, ports and sea-side resorts.

In games, the children used small balls and their hands and feet to travel in and out of cones keeping control of the ball. 

🌟Happy New Year Everyone! 🌟

This week in maths we have been very busy! We started the new year thinking about where numbers appear on a number line. The children used language such as, ‘between’ and ‘one more’ or ‘one less’ to describe why they placed the number in that position on the number line. We then used out maths toolkits to show our understand of number bonds to 5 and 6. The children showed their understand by working systematically to find all the possibilities and using various models and maths resources from our toolkit boxes. They then write the corresponding number sentences! 

In computing this week we starting thinking about digital writing and how this compared with other ways to write. The children learnt that one way to write on a computer is to use the word processor ‘Word’. The children then write their names. They used ‘Caps Lock’ to write capital letters, the ‘space bar’ to make a finger space and ‘backspace’ and ‘delete’ to edit what they’d written.

We started out Geography learning about the United Kingdom this week and the children learnt that there are 4 countries that make up the UK and their names. They used a map to locate them and we played a little game to practise saying them. The children then used the 4 main compass points to navigate their partner around the UK map. 

This week in gymnastics we learnt to create shapes by balancing on the body parts we call ‘points’. This included: the head, feet, hands, elbows and knees. They also travelled around the room in different ways and demonstrated how they could create balances on the apparatus using their ‘points’.

In DT this week, the children started learning about different freestanding structures. They were then told that the Billy Goats Gruff were looking for their help. They needed a way to get across the river, where the Troll lived, to avoid being eaten. The children decided that the freestanding structure they thought would be best to help the goats, was a bridge. Next week, the children will learn different techniques for joining paper together as the first step towards designing and building their own bridges! Can they make a paper bridge strong enough to hold a toy goat?