Class Wide Reward Party - The Teddy Bear Picnic

The Giants have shown consistently how fantastic they are in their learning and their behaviour. Good learning zone behaviour leads to great learning and also means that I can plan fun lessons without fear of chaos! Yet again the Giants have reached 100 class wide rewards and chose to have a teddy bear picnic. We took our teddies and blankets and enjoyed the lovely weather. After munching on biscuits and reading a funny story, we played some fun party games! I think a colouring party is their next choice! 

Forest School Part 2

After making first contact, we discovered that there were very small aliens indigenous to the planet we had terraformed. They had no idea what to make of our earth plants, so we needed to help them by making them houses from what we found. The aliens themselves were only the size of 3 multilink cubes. The children set off to work:

Week 5 - Forest School

This week we were scheduled to be at forest school. Unfortunately we had already left the planet and were visiting an alien planet. Luckily for us it had already been terraformed and was full of Earth plants and trees! This planet had alien life, but having no ears, they needed us to write them messages of greeting. After planning what we needed so carefully we had overlooked the need to take pens or pencils. This meant that we needed to get creative and work out how to write them a message using only what we found in forest school...I mean the alien planet...

Week 4

This is the term that we are looking ahead to our phonics screening in June. There is now a booster group in Read Write Inc. called the comets that is dedicated to helping some children achieve an age related mark. Reading levels in Year 1 are very good thanks to the RWI programme as a whole and thanks to all of our parents' hard work at home with the children. However, learning to read and spell need not always be a chore with these fab games:

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/english-games/5-7-years/words-and-spelling

We have also been learning about multiplication in Year 1. The children can count in 2s, 5s and 10s. They are also familiar with the concept of groups of. If you would like to have a go at times tables in a fun way there is another good game:

https://www.timestables.co.uk/happy-burger.html 

Week 3

What are arrays?

Arrays are a pictorial representation to help children understand times tables. For example, a child may be given the following word problem:

I have 3 bags. There are 5 pennies in each bag. How many pennies do I have altogether?

A teacher might show the children that the first bag has five pennies and draw the five pennies in a line. Then they would explain that the second bag also has five pennies, and draw a second line. They would continue until they had drawn 3 lines of 5 pennies like this:

The teacher might then explain that rather than counting all the pennies individually, you could work out the answer by counting each line in 5s. The teacher could then point to each line and count 5, 10, 15 to show the children that there were 15 pennies in all.

Teachers in Key Stage 1 will teach children how to count in 2s, 5s and 10s and make sure they are very confident in this, before going on to show them how to work out times table problems like this one using arrays. 

This is because children need to be able to count up in steps of different numbers before they can use arrays to help them.

In Giants we are also learning the difference between the columns and the rows. We remember that columns go up and down and rows go side to side. Here is a great game to try at home:

http://education.abc.net.au/home#!/media/1496767/the-array

Week 2

As it's Summer term we are learning all about multiplication in year1. Some children are already tackling the 10 times table in their learn-its but in the giants we are starting at a practical level. It all starts with learning about equal groups. In our classroom we have lots of manipulatives that we use to help us solve challenges:

Week 1 - It's summer!!!

We're back to school after a nice long rest and looking forward to a few Bank holidays coming up. Meanwhile we have finished the Great Fire of London topic and to round it off nicely, we're off to Gerry's Bakery and Coffee House on South road!