Our theme of bears continued from last week with all children bringing their teddy to school on Monday. The children used their bears in maths to do some measuring. The teddies were measured with strips of paper to find out which teddy was the tallest. The pieces of paper were put in length order and from this we could tell that Amber’s teddy was the tallest and Kanishk’s teddy the shortest and the children could see where their teddy came in the height order. Secondly the teddies were measured with strips of paper to find the fattest and the thinnest and the children could see where their teddies were compared to the extremes. The children also made a block graph to see how many teddies there were of each colour. Writing about their teddies and drawing around them in art and using the chalks and wax pastels to colour them and using ‘Find the bear’ in ICT to extend the children’s ability to drag and drop according to positional instructions concluded a busy Monday.
In phonics the sounds taught and practised were ‘ar’ and ‘oy’ and ‘oi’ . We looked at real words and ‘alien’ words and stories with these sounds in and practised writing words on the phoneme frames using these sounds. br>
In maths we have been concentrating on counting along a number line in 1’s and 2’s and making sure number recognition to 20 is progressing. Our mental warm up to lessons this week have been counting to 100 in 1’s on the abacus and then in 10’s and answering questions about numbers on the number line.
In our ‘Knowledge and understanding of the world’ we have looked at old teddy bears and learnt more about different birds that we hoped to see when we went bird watching. On Thursday groups of children went out with the binoculars and cameras to complete the ‘Little Schools Birdwatch’ so that we could submit our results to the RSBP. During the hour the children saw pigeons, rooks, starlings, a sparrow, great tit, magpies, a dunnock, a collared dove, a seagull, several blackbirds and a robin.
Music was about ‘The bear Hunt’ and the children choose from a large range of instruments to make the sound effects and then retold the story together.
Next week we look forward to a visiting artist on Monday and Tuesday and we continue learning about old toys in preparation for our visit Stevenage Museum and setting up our own class museum. We hope that the parents and grandparents will see if they have any of their old toys which we can look at for Show and Tell next Friday. Also if you have any old, clean socks for the children to make into snakes that would be brilliant.