Week 15

Welcome back! We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and new year.

This week we settled back into our routines and explored our new season of winter. The children explored what different types of weather we can expect in the UK, they looked at the UK on the globe and spoke about if the weather is the same all over the world. The children discussed which types of clothing we wear in the winter to keep us warm. We also learnt about animals that hibernate. We shared the story of ‘Don’t hog the hedge’ and learnt about how some animals sleep all through winter, we also learnt that some animals migrate to warmer countries to escape the cold weather. They classified and sorted animals which hibernate and those which do not. They drew the animals onto a table to show their understanding.

We explored the properties of ice and discussed how ice is solid and then melts and turns into a liquid. The children were very knowledgeable and knew heat made ice melt, they also realized very quickly that ice made your hands very cold!

In maths, we learnt about zero, we enjoyed reading ‘None the number’ and debated if none is a number- read the story and see what you think!

Please can you check that all items of your children’s school uniform are named. Thank you.

Week 16

We have introduced our new big question this week, ‘Is it all just rubbish?’ The children learnt about where all our rubbish goes and what can happen to it if we recycle it. We looked at the impact rubbish can have on our environment. The children discovered that our rubbish is made from all different types of materials such as paper, cardboard, glass, metal and plastic. We learnt about how these materials are sorted, cleaned and recycled to make something new. The children all took part in a recycling sorting activity and separated all the items according to their material. We also learnt about the 3 Rs- Reuse, Reduce and Recycle.

They used their letter and sounds skills to write a list of items that can be recycled and also wrote about what they knew about the 3 Rs.

We looked at how we can reuse items rather than throw them away. The children spoke about clothes they had grown out of and how their clothes were given to a younger cousin or friend. We created our own recycling centre in the outside area. We labelled lots of boxes and then sorted the rubbish independently. We discovered that we could use use a magnet to test if things are made from metal. We also read the story of the life of a plastic bottle and the life of a cardboard box. We watched several videos which showed how things that are recycled are made into something new.

For maths this week we continued embedding our understanding of 0-5 also looking at 1 more and 1 less. We sang songs about monkeys jumping on the bed and melting snowmen-sing along at home using the videos.

Week 17

Wow! What a cold week we have had! The children have enjoyed exploring the effects of winter weather and how the environment changes with the ice and frost. They quickly realised the cold makes your hands hurt! They investigated the properties of the ice that had formed in our water tray, firstly they freed the trapped sea world animals from their icy cage. They then moved on to experiment what happened when the ice was dropped, hit and trodden on. They discovered that the pieces left in the sun melted.

We continued our big question ‘Is it all just rubbish?’ by reading the story The Messy Magpie. We were introduced to the character of Morris who thought he was making his forest look lovely by filling it with rubbish but it made the forest and the animal’s habitat polluted and the animals got sick. The children retold the story using their phonic knowledge to write the words. They did an amazing job! They were also challenged to create a picture to show the contrast of a sad forest and a happy forest. The class had great fun acting out the story of Morris using masks to take on the different roles. They used the small world animals to role play what happened to the forest when it was filled with rubbish. We spoke about how it made them feel when the forest was polluted and how they then felt when the forest was cleaned up. They wrote about their feelings and we explored words which we could use such as unhappy, upset, sad, angry happy and better.

For maths this week we have been exploring mass through weight and capacity. We built on our understanding of heavy, light and balance. The children used the balance scales to explore which objects were heavier, lighter or equal.  We also recapped on capacity and how the mass of an object changes the amount that can fill a cup.

Please share the stories below at home as they have enjoyed them so much in school this week.