Few weeks ending 12thMay 2017
What an exciting few weeks we have had in Pink Class!
We have started a new topic of ‘Under the Sea’. The children have loved looking at a range of fiction books, non-fiction books, videos and powerpoints. They have been challenged to research facts about sea creatures independently and read them to a friend and an adult. The children all had a great time on the school trip to Blue Planet Aquarium and have used their creative streak to paint pictures and make collages of all of the interesting creatures that they saw there.
During phonics, as well as continuing to revise our Phase 3 digraphs and trigraphs, we have been focusing on Phase 4 blends and clusters. Looking at how to read words containing them and how to segment and write words with them in accurately. We have also been working really hard to remember to use punctuation in our writing. In a focus to apply these skills, the children studied videos and photographs of a variety of different sharks and discussed lot of interesting facts about them. The children produced some fantastic independent writing. They not only remembered some really interesting facts and segmented words to spell them in a phonetically plausible way but also used capital letters at the start of sentences and a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark at the end!
In Maths, we have introduced and revised several different topics, using a plethora of songs, games and practical activities. During our work on doubles, the children enjoyed making ‘doubles ladybirds’. We then looked at halving (in relation to doubling) and with the aid of two characters called Meredith and Harvey, the children learnt how to halve numbers, using some sweets to help them. More recently, we have been revising 3D shapes. The children have learnt a 3D shape ‘rap’, met the 3D shape ‘characters’ and learnt many 3D shape names and properties. They then applied their knowledge to successfully sort Mr Ratchford’s mixed up shopping into groups of 3D shapes. They also did a super job of making 3D shapes out of marshmallows and cocktail sticks. The children enjoyed showing off their technical language whilst making cubes, cuboids, as well as triangular-basedand square-based pyramids!
Last week we also focused on exploring the concept of ‘floating’ and ‘sinking’. After a lively discussion predicting and testing which objects floated and which sank, the children explored a range of further objects themselves. They then recorded the results independently.
The recent good weather has also enabled more ‘play for learn’ to take place outside. The children have loved utilising the outdoor area of the classroom (constructing on a larger scale, writing on the playground and experimenting with sand and water activities) as well as challenging their physical capabilities on the Trim Trail.