Week 5

For our penultimate week in school we learned all about the author Eric Carle. He wrote many wonderful stories for young children including 'The Hungry Caterpillar' who our Caterpillars Class are named after. He also wrote 'The mixed up Chameleon' which is the inspiration for our brand new Chameleons Class which will start in September.

Over the week we read lots of his stories and we looked carefully at the illustrations. They are so imaginative and colourful! We learned how Eric Carle created them using tissue paper and paint. Then we worked in pairs to copy the same technique and fill large pieces of paper. Then we used these to create a Chameleon for a display for the new class. We thought about the animals in the story and used colours to represent them such as red, orange and brown for the fox. We are so proud of the finished display and we hope our new class love it too.

Big Maths Beat That

Every Friday we practise our calculation skills against the clock in Big Maths Beat That quiz. We have 30 seconds to answer as many questions as we can. Here are the 4 levels used in class incase you want to try them at home.

Week 5

Football fever hit the Seashells classroom this week. We learned all about the Euros.

We started by playing detectives and working out which football related objects were hiding behind the screen. The children were brilliant at identifying the pictures. We got very excited when we saw the trophy.

Then we watched a video to see how Skillzy became the Euros mascot. After that we designed kits for our own teams. We looked at the patterns and colours on past England kits including some really famous ones. Can you remember what all the kits have in common? Yes, the three lions emblem.

Whilst we did our work we listened to lots of famous football songs and when we were outside, the bikes were put away so we had lots of space to play football. GOAL!

Later in the week we looked at the flags from all the teams that are competing in the Euros. We identified which country they belonged to and then we made our own. We also named some of the players in the England team. See how many countries you can name from their flags below. 

Week 4

We have been looking at money this week in our maths lessons. we listened to this song about some of the coins. Then we each had a coin to look at. We thought about the shape size and colour and looked carefully for clues about how much they might be worth. We noticed that all the coins have the Queen's head on one side and then a design on the other side. Some have  a number and some don't. We identified which coin we had and compared it with our friends' coins to see if they were the same or different.

Week 3

We had another letter from Nancy. This time she gave us a recipe for salt dough so that we could make our own dinosaur fossils. We worked together to measure out the flour and salt, and mix it together with the water to form the dough. Then we worked out how many pieces the dough needed to be divided into so that each person got some. Finally we flattened the dough and pressed dinosaurs into it to create fossils. It takes a few days to dry and then we can put them in our museum.

Week 2

This week we have been looking at grouping. We read a story called Bean Thirteen about 2 bugs who try to divide beans between their friends. Then we put beads onto strings in groups of 2 and 3 and compared them.

In topic, we had another letter from Nancy Roarsome. She needs the egg back so she gave us some instructions for how to make our own dinosaur eggs using papier mache. We read the instructions together and worked in our groups to apply the first layer. It was very messy but lots of fun.

Week 1

We hope that you had a wonderful half term break and had chance to enjoy the fabulous sunshine. Can you believe that we only have 6 weeks left until the Summer Holidays?

We have lots of fun filled learning to fit in starting with 3 days in the forest school.

Forest School day 1 - A mysterious egg

As we entered our secret garden, we discovered a giant footprint. It was much bigger than our own and someone noticed it had 3 toes. As we moved further we found another similar footprint and then we found a nest which contained an egg. I wonder what creature made the footprints and did they have something to do with the mysterious egg?

We also found a letter lying close the the egg so we opened it. It was from Nancy Roarsome - a paleontologist who needed our help to create some nests for her new exhibition at the museum. The nests needed to be cosy but also sturdy enough to hold the egg without it rolling out, and also be made of natural materials. The children were brilliant at working in their teams to find natural materials from the forest such as bark, twigs and leaves and then arrange them into a nest shape.

Forest School Day 2 - Dinosaur Dig

We received a second letter from Nancy, this time she'd come to the forest to see our nests and she'd found a dinosaur bone. She  thought it could be one of many so asked for our help to conduct a dig, like real paleontologists. We watched a video clip to learn more about what paleontologists do and read some instructions for how to carry out a dig safely.

When we got to the forest, Nancy had marked out 4 dig sites and left us tools including trowels, spades and sieves. She'd also set up a cleaning station with brushes so we could carefully clean  any bones that we found. We also used tweezers to ensure we didn't damage the bones and magnifying glasses to look carefully at each one and help work out which body part it was. All sorts of bones were found. Then we had a go at putting them together into a skeleton and worked out that it was possibly a baby T-Rex. Great work everyone!

Forest school maths

On Tuesday afternoon, we read a Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs story and then we went into the forest to measure the Dinosaurs. (Harry told us that they were all arguing over who was the longest!) We talked about different ways we could measure them, we knew that the unit of measurement has to be the same to make it fair. We used unifix cubes. Once we'd measured them, we put them in length order. In the end the Argentinosaurus was the longest at 24 unifix blocks long.