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.