A Dinosaur Came to Visit

Once we had the footprints in our classroom we had a new clue as to what had left the egg in our classroom. It generated many conversations and there was all of a sudden a lot of talk about dinosaurs.

We decided to set up the camera overnight and see if there were any visitors to our classroom. You will not believe what we saw!

There was a dinosaur in our classroom! He walked all over the table and did a BIG roar before he left again. It made us believe we had been right when we said there was a dinosaur in the egg. Some children quickly got to work and started making a trap to try and capture the dinosaur. They thought about a fake egg to trick the dinosaur into coming and having a look, a rope to trip him up and some water to pour on his head once he was trapped. There was lots of cooperative thinking to solve their problem.

Then Miss Deakin came back from setting up the Outdoor Are and told us she’d seen another footprint. We went to have a look. It was so much bigger than the ones in the classroom. We measured to see how long it was.

Everyone was amazed to see how much bigger than our feet the dinosaur footprint was. We decided to measure it in some different ways.

We then used this information to measure some smaller footprints of our own and smaller measuring units. We worked with a partner to choose a unit to measure with and then measure the footprint. We made sure we followed the same rules.

And then…..

We did a wonderful job making our dinosaur a shoe. Can you imagine how big the show shop would need to be if this is just one shoe?!?

Our parents and carers made some comments in our Floor Book. We love knowing what the children are talking about at home and which learning they are sharing.

What have we been learning? 

• to measure in different ways using a variety of different non-standard objects, such as cubes, bottle tops, whiteboard pens. 
• to meet challenges and solve problems, such as how do we make a shoe for the dinosaur and how do we capture a dinosaur.

How can you continue the learning at home? 

• Collect some objects at home, such as pennies, bottle tops, forks and so long as they are all the same size use them to measure some bigger objects in your house, like the table. 
• Use footsteps to measure some of your garden. How long is the path? How wide is your doorway? 
• allow your child to help you solve simple problems in the home, such as we have 5 people in our house and they want 2 biscuits each? How many do we need altogether? 

A Strange Egg

So we had a strange egg in our classroom, but what could it be? We had lots of suggestions about what it could possibly be. Some children thought it was a giant chocolate egg (Miss Parker wishes it had have been! ;-)) but then we got a note which made us change our mind…..

The Easter Bunny told us it was going to hatch. That meant something was alive in there. We decided we had better learn about eggs and find out which creatures came from eggs. Some children wrote signs saying to stay away from our egg and make sure it stayed safe.

We spent the week investigating eggs and then there was a development. The egg disappeared and there were footprints. Where had it gone?

Zooming Zog and Friends

If you remember our elf gave us a couple of presents before Christmas- a copy of the book Zog by Julia Donaldson and a toy Zog as well. Click on this link to see the full post

We were all very excited when we came back to school after Christmas because we’d seen Zog on the television during the holidays. We began to talk about Zog and what we knew about him. We read the book again and watched the animation. Everyone loved Zog so much we decided to try and learn the story for ourselves. Miss Parker helped us make a story map which helped us remember what came next. We also made sure we remembered to use the repeating text, “Now that you’ve been shown, you can practise on your own”. Can you remember the words and tell your grown up? 

When we were outside some of us had a go at learning to fly like Zog had done. It was a little bit risky but we talked about how to keep ourselves safe and look after our friends.

Some children also helped Zog out by helping him free animals, people and other objects which had got frozen in the ice. We had to try and work out the best way to free the objects in the quickest way. Can you remember how to melt the ice quickly? 

You can see what we said about it in our Floor Book and also see some conversations from the rest of the week.

When we watched the animation of Zog we also talked about how some of the other Julia Donaldson books which we’d been reading had been turned into animations as well. the children loved reading the books and watching the animations.

When we were watching Stick Man we made an important discovery: the animations had been made by humans. Even though we were watching them on the computer a person had to make it first. We wondered whether we could be animators too. We found out that we could.

Miss Parker found a programme which meant we could be animators called 2Animate on Purple Mash. We collected some ideas about what our animations could look like and after trying some as a class we made some of our own looking at the books to check. We had to work together in teams to make sure our animation was a joint effort.

Parents/ carers- your child has now been given their own password to use Purple Mash at home. Can you remember how to make an animation and show your grown ups? 

All week we had been reading more and more Julia Donaldson books. We couldn’t believe how many books she had written. Can you remember some of the other books that Julia Donaldson has written? There is a clue here! Have you read them all? Don’t forget to look in the library if you’ve not read them all. 

We decided that we wanted to find out more about Julia Donaldson. You can see some of our questions in the Floor Book here.

You can also see what we found out and also how we found it out. Some of our questions were answered by reading Julia Donaldson A Biography, some them we asked Google and some of them we answered by asking Siri when some children suggested this as a possible way of finding out information. We did talk about making sure we stay safe when using the internet and Siri or Alexa.

We had such a good time learning about Zog and then animation and then Julia Donaldson. Miss Parker and the teachers loved seeing the children’s ideas flow from one week to the next developing into the next focus. The following week we asked if Julia Donaldson was the only author and started to look at different authors whose books we might like. The children keep returning to Julia Donaldson though- she really is a favourite 🙂

The teachers were all really impressed by the children’s writing in the Floor Book and how their confidence is growing all the time at writing more independently. Well done everyone!

What have we been learning? 

• to retell stories we have heard. 
• to make animations using 2Animate. 
• to investigate what happens to ice. 
• to think about how things get onto the computer and tv screens we watch
• to find out about an author by asking questions. 
• to use books and computers to find out information.

How you can continue the learning at home? 

• Visit the library and find some Julia Donaldson books to read together. 
• Use your Purple Mash password and try to make an animation or picture of your own. Don’t forget to save it and let us know its there. https://www.purplemash.com
• See if you can find out about a different author- Which books have they written?

 

 

Celebrating Bonfire Night

On our first day back at school everyone was very excited about Bonfire Night and all the fireworks we’d seen the night before. We did lots of talking about the different fireworks that we’d seen. Miss Parker and the other teachers noticed we used the word BANG! a lot but found it hard to use different words to describe what we saw and heard. We spent a lot of the week looking carefully at fireworks and even being fireworks in PE so we could develop our vocabulary and use many more words to talk about them. By the end of the week we’d got much better and we’re using a variety of different words.

We even had a go at writing in our Floor Book ourselves. We’ve been working really hard to do more writing and mark making by ourselves and by writing in the Floor Book we get to see the value of our efforts. It’ll be great to be able to look back and see how much progress we’ve made during the year as well.

Can you remember any of the exciting words we learnt to talk about the fireworks? 

It was very exciting one day because we got to do some Forest Schools with Miss Deighton and go to a real fire. We learnt how to stay safe near the fire and also got to enjoy marshmallows that we toasted on the fire ourselves. We also watched the sparklers with Mrs Murch and enjoyed hot chocolate. It gave us another chance to think of all the exciting words we could think of to describe what we saw, heard and tasted.

Did you enjoy going to the Bonfire? Tell a grown up what it felt like. 

In Maths we decided to make fireworks from 2-D shapes. This helped us to think of different ways to describe the firework shapes we saw. Look at some of the amazing creations we made…

We had to make sure we could talk about the properties of the shapes as well as know their names.

Can you remember anything about the different shapes? 

We had a wonderful Bonfire Night Week at school 🙂 A big thank you to Miss Deighton for helping us with the Forest School Fire.

What have we been learning? 

• to think of interesting and exciting words to describe fireworks. 
• to stay safe near fires and also about the way the heat from fire will melt objects. 
• to describe the properties of 2D shapes and use them to make pictures and representations. 

How can you continue the learning at home? 

• Encourage your child to use new and interesting words. For example, don’t let them refer to every big object as just big. Talk about huge, enormous and massive as well and decide which is best. 
• Encourage children to manage risk, such as being near a fire, and teach them how to make themselves safe. 
• Look for 2D shapes around your house and do a 2D shape Hunt. Can your child tell you how many sides or corners the shape has? 

Environment and Global Citizenship Weeks

Before the Spring Bank break it was Environment Week in school closely followed by Global Citizenship Week. We decided to base our learning for Environment Week around the film Wall-E. Look at our Floor Book to see what we learnt about.

The week after was Global Citizenship Week. We based our learning around the TASC wheel and tried to answer the question:

Where is the best place to live in the world? 

It was hard to decide because there are so many exciting places we could have chosen. We had to know enough about the place chose to explain why we’d live there and also why it was better than anywhere else. First we asked our parents/ carers if we had any family who lived in another place or if we’d ever been to any other places. This helped make our discussions more relevant to us.

Look at our Floor Book to see what else we decided……

What we have been learning? 

• About our place in the world. 
• About how we can help the world stay a nice place to live.
• About different countries around the world. 
• How we have links around the world even if we’ve never been before. 
• What we know about different countries around the world. 
• How we can use what we know to help us answer a question. 

How can you continue the learning at home?

• Talk to your child about any links they have around the world. 
• Let your child help you recycle into the different bins you have at home. 
• Talk to your child about keeping their bedroom tidy to help keep your home environment nice.

Gummy Bear Science

When we were talking about what the children knew about bears some children began to talk about Gummy Bears.

Vinnie said he knew an experiment where the bears get bigger so we decided to give it a go and see if we could make our Gummy Bears bigger.

We made it more interesting by putting our Gummy Bears in different liquids and seeing if it made a difference. Everyone predicted what would happen and we recorded it in our Floor Book.

Then we left our Gummy Bears alone for a week only looking to see what was happening.

Look at our Gummy Bears next to the original sized ones. Can you see what has happened? We recorded our ideas again in our Floor Book.

We loved that they’d got bigger! We talked about how it had happened and OSMOSIS!

What have we been learning?

• How to carry out an experiment fairly
• to predict what might happen
• to talk about what we saw happen
• to think about possible reasons for what we’ve seen

How can you continue the learning at home?

• Look out for other fun Science experiments you can do together at home online and in Science books
• Try the Gummy Bear experiment at home- you could try it with different liquids such as washing up liquid.
• Don’t forget to let us know what happens on either en email or wow moment.

 

Chinese New Year Celebrations

Last week we saw on the calendar it was Chinese New Year and decided that we wanted to find out more about it.

We saw on the picture and on the front of the Chinese New Year book in our classroom there was dragon. We went to look at the Y6 dragon on the staircase in school. It made us decide that we wanted to make our own. We watched a video of a dragon dance and thought we could do a dragon dance of our own. We talked about what we saw.

There was another discussion about Chinese Food. Lots of the children said they’ve not tried it before so we decided that is what we should do.

We also thought what else we wanted to know about Chinses New Year and wrote some questions. Some of us wrote it by ourselves, some of us wrote shared sentences with teacher help.

During the week we did lots of learning about Chinese New Year. We watched some videos to find out more. You can watch them here.  There is one about preparing for Chinese New Year, one about celebrating Chinese New Year and one with the Chinese New Year Story.

We enjoyed having our own races outside and seeing which animal came first, second and third when we ran.

When our dragon was finished we did what we said we wanted to and took it to the Hall to do some dragon dancing. Some of us made the dragon dance and some of us played the instruments for the music.

One of our favourite things we did during the week was we tried Chinese Food. Miss Parker said we had to cook it ourselves so we went to the oven and the microwave to cook it before we could eat it.

You can see more about what we thought about our food in the floor book. You can also see we found out the answers to our questions.  We also loved trying the fortune cookies.

You can see the questions we wrote and the answers we found out here…

We have loved learning about Chinese New Year!

What have we been learning? 

• about how different people celebrate. 
• some of the ways that Chinese people celebrate Chinese New Year. 
• to think of questions about what we could find out. 
• to find out the answers to our questions. 
• to order numbers and use ordinal numbers such as first, second and third. 
• to taste new foods and talk about how it tasted. 
• to move to music and create our own.

How can you continue the learning at home? 

• Watch the videos again and see if you can find out anything new. 
• Have some races in the park and see who the winner is. 
• Think of some other things that you’d like to find out and look in books to find the answer. 

Our Fabulous Volcano

We had a great time learning about volcanoes recently. It actually came about due to a misconception that one of the children had when they confused the cave in We’re Going On a Bear Hunt for a volcano.

It started is thinking what is a volcano and could we make our own. First we watched a video about volcanoes to find out more.

You can watch the video by clicking on this link.

Then we started to think if we could make our own volcano which would erupt.

It took a full week to make as we had to do the paper mache and wait for it to dry before we could paint it. We had to look at lots of books and remember the video to find out what they looked like. We went to our school library to find some volcano books.

 

Finally our volcano was ready to see if it would erupt. We were all very excited to see what would happen.

Our volcano did erupt but it also spent some time when it didn’t so we talked about when volcanoes are dormant or extinct.

We also shared our learning with some of the children in Garnet class and showed them our videos.

Mateo wanted to know when we were going on a Volcano Hunt!!! Do you know where we’d have to go to find volcanoes? See if you can find out.

What have we been learning? 

• What is a volcano. 
• How to make different shapes so we can make a volcano. 
• To be careful when doing Science investigations. 
• To share our learning with our friends. 

How can you continue the learning at home? 

• Watch the video on the link above- what can you find out about volcanoes? 
• Find some books about volcanoes at the library- where do you find volcanoes?
• Answer the following question- Would you want to stand on a volcano? Why? 

 

Fabulous Fireworks

When it was Bonfire Night we had lots of fun learning about fireworks. There were lots of activities to do in our classroom to really get us thinking about what the fireworks looked like and sounded like. We even had a go at moving our bodies like the fireworks.

 

Once we’d done all the different activities we turned our ideas into poems on the computer. Miss Parker found a programme which meant the words moved and made sounds! We had to sound out to spell the words and think carefully which letters made those sounds.

Look at some of our finished poems… Can you read them back looking at the sounds and letters?  

Pictures of the poems are coming soon!

You can look in our floor book to see some more of our learning.

What have we been learning? 

• To think about Bonfire Night using all of our senses. 
• To think about how we can move like fireworks. 
• To make pictures and models of fireworks looking carefully what we want them to look like. 
• To sound out to spell new words and find the letters to make the sounds. 

How can you continue the learning at home? 

• Talk about different sounds and what makes the sounds. You can look on the Phonics Play website on the Phase 1  Sound Starters. Look in your homework book for the password. 
• Try and sound out to spell some other simple words. Do you know what the letters look like for each sound? 
• Think about the different times of year we have fireworks. Which celebrations often have fireworks? 

 

Our Family Poems

After Grandparents Day, we started talking about our families and who is in our family. It sparked lots of learning about our families and people we know.  We brought photos in from home of our families to share with everybody. It was also National Poetry Day in the same week so we combined the two and wrote our own poems. We had to tell the grown ups our ideas and they helped us to make them into a poem.

Look at our Anthology here….

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Didn’t we we do a marvellous job? Did you find your poem? You can find the actual book in our classroom in the Book Corner.

You can see some of the other learning we did in our Floor Book here…

We talked about the babies in our family and what happens as we grow up and get older. We thought if it was better to be a kid or to be a grown up! I wonder if our grown ups think the same as we did?!?Miss Parker brought her teddy bear which she got when she was only a few days old. We looked at it to see how much she had grown and also talked about what had happened to the bear since then. 

We talked about teddy bears and wanting to go to Build A Bear Workshop at Meadowhall. We’re hopefully going to go in the New Year so look out for the letter.

What have we been learning?

• Who is in our family and how everyone is related. 
• To talk about our family and to say what is important to us about them. 
• To put our ideas into a poem. 
• To recognise our names in the Anthology and names of people in our family. 
• How people grow up and change. 
• How objects change as they get old. 

How can you continue the learning at home?

• Talk about who is in your family and how everyone is related- the children often get this confused. 
• Show the poem your child wrote to the people in your family and ask them what they think. 
• Try and write your own poem about something different- favourite animals, places you go etc- and bring it to school to show us. 
• Look at any objects you have from your childhood with your child. Talk about how it is special to you and how it might have changed