The children welcomed their teddy bears into school on Monday as we embarked on a day of ‘bear centred’ activity. The teddy bears were measured to find out which one was the tallest and who had the shortest.one. Ellie’s teddy was by far the tallest with Faye’s being the shortest.
When we measured the waists of our teddy using the ‘links’ we were not surprised to find out that the tallest teddies were also the fattest. There were two more yellow teddies than brown teddies and only one blue teddy. We had five different colours altogether.
The written descriptions and the paintings after drawing round the bears gave the children the opportunity to study their bear in a bit more detail and record their work.
Mrs. Wagstaffe took the children out in groups to do some bird watching. The different groups spotted between them, magpies, crows, gulls, pigeons, a robin, chaffinch, long tailed tit, blue tit, great tit blackbirds and sparrows.
This weekend is the RSPB garden bird watch so if you have some binoculars or a bird table or just put out some food and water for the birds and spend some time over the weekend looking at what comes into your garden. http://www.rspb.org.uk/discoverandenjoynature/discoverandlearn/birdwatch/how.aspx
We all enjoyed re-enacting the story of the Bear Hunt in the hall on Wednesday morning. Mr. Sears helped to build a fantastic cave with the A-frames and parachutes. All of the class managed to get inside, although it was a little frantic when the bear emerged and the children ran back home following their route through the snowstorm, woods, mud, river and long grass. Watching Michael Rosen read the story of ‘The Bear Hunt’ in the afternoon inspired some great paintings. Michael Rosen reading the Bear Hunt can be viewed on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gyI6ykDwds&safe=active
In maths we have been practising our adding sums with a number track. Several children are finding this difficult because they are counting their starting square as their first jump. Playing board games such as Snakes and Ladders will help. A copy of this can be down loaded from ‘Sparklebox’ if you don’t own the game. We will be making track games so that the children get better at counting on and back, skills which will be used a lot in their maths next term.
Next week we move on to learning about ‘old toys’. Parents, please see what you can find from your childhood. Your old toys, books or games, or photographs of you playing with your toys when you were a child would be greatly appreciated on Wednesday for Show and tell. All toys that are ‘really’ old will be treated with great respect and kept at a safe distance from the children and handled under close adult supervision. We would like to keep the old toys in school for our toy museum but the children will not be allowed to play with them, we are following true museum procedure!
Wednesday morning the lady from Stevenage Museum will be bringing in the old toys for us to handle and discuss. It is unfortunate that the museum is closed at present for repairs but maybe it will be open during half term for you to visit.
Please try and remember a sock for Monday as we are following instructions to make a sock puppet. The box will be used later in the week or possibly the following week for making a toy. Maybe you could discuss what toy it could be made into and collect some other bits that might be useful.
We hope you all have an enjoyable weekend.