With the start of the ‘Big Schools’ Birdwatch’ the children have been learning about different birds that we hope to see when the binoculars come out and we go bird watching next week. They made bird cakes to encourage birds onto our school site. We made the ‘dark den’ into a bird hide to conceal the children. However some ‘gags’ may be needed as our noise and excitement on seeing any birds whilst we were hanging out the ‘bird cakes scared away every bird in sight!
Most of our other activities this week centred around the well-known story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.In literacy we have been reading different versions of the well-known story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Throughout the week we read books together under the visualiser, encouraging the children to read along and then discussed different aspects of the book. The children watched it on http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-stories-goldilocks.htm
The children wrote sentences about pictures from the story using their word grid and word book. They reordered pictures to retell the story and then told it verbally. They made the characters from the story as finger puppets and acted out the story as a class, all doing the voices for the characters together as the story progressed. In our ‘Understanding of the world’ we followed instructions on how to make porridge and then many of the children enjoyed eating it! In ‘shared writing’ the children made lists of all the things they knew about ‘real’ bears and wrote their favourite facts. Reece was especially knowledgeable about bears and told us lots of interesting information.
In phonics the sounds taught and practised were ‘igh’ and ‘ie’ and ‘ee and ea. We looked at real words and ‘alien’ words and stories with these sounds in and practised writing words on the phoneme frames. The children are doing really well learning the diagraphs but find it harder to recognise them in words so please work on the word lists.
In maths we have been doing lots of work on using correct mathematical terminology. This is a requirement in the ‘Ages and Stages’ documentation. Through our practical maths we have been making sets with more and fewer objects, and using the language to compare amounts.
Our work using the language of size to compare similar objects highlighted the need to move the children on from describing everything as big or little. There were also a lot of made up words being used eg biggerest! Lots of comparison work is needed using the language of small, smaller, smallest, big, bigger, biggest, tall, taller, tallest. For example Dan is taller than William but shorter than Raphael who is the tallest boy in the class.
Music was about Goldilocks and the children loved the Goldilocks rap!
Show and Tell was interesting when the children showed us their family photographs but they still need to practise speaking in loud voices when addressing a group.
In ICT we practised used a Goldilocks drag and drop programme in My World to practise mouse control. The children also programmed Bee-Bot to move around a Goldilocks and the Three Bears grid and a spot the bird grid. A turn was incorporated and then moving on from a turn. If you have an I-pad, why don’t you download the free Bee- Bot app. There is one more session of programming next week before we move on to a new area.
Next week we continue our work about bears by looking at our teddy bears and bears in stories. Do not forget your teddy on Monday please as we will be using it for every subject and it will need to stay in school for lessons on Tuesday .
Don’t forget that we are doing old toys the week after next so dig out any old toys from your childhood, the older the better. We promise to take great care of them. Unfortunately we usually go to a museum to look at old toys but they are too booked up this year to accommodate us.
Have a good weekend and we hope to see the children and a lot of teddy friends on Monday.