Art

This term in Art the Chameleons are looking at the artist Edward Tingatinga who is an African artist who painted a range of different African animals and created a new style of art called Tingatinga. We started exploring the style using cotton buds to create different dot patterns.

We continued our Art project by following step by step instructions to draw our African animals. 

Next we needed to paint our animals, we picked the colours we would need for our giraffes and lions and tried mixing colours to make brown. Then we used our cotton buds to make spots on our animal pictures in the style of Tinga Tinga. 

To make the background we used watered down paint and thick brushes to make a sunset pattern for our animal.

These are our finished Tinga Tinga paintings! 

African Drumming

We had the opportunity to explore African drumming, we learnt how to properly hold an African drum to get the best sound and different rhythms to play. At the end of the day we got to perform our drumming to our grownups including getting into the middle to dance to the drumming.

Maths

We have been practicing our subitising using dice to spot numbers between 1 and 6. Then we played turn taking games using the dice to practice jumping on a number line. 

We played a game called 'Who's hiding?'

First we built staircase patterns from 1 to 5 using cubes and then in our groups one person hid a tower and we had to work out which number was missing. 

We learnt the song 'Five Speckled Frogs' and used that to help us learn our number bonds to 5. We learnt actions to the song and later became the frogs in the song. We practiced our number bonds to 5 by playing a throwing game and quickly working out how many we got in and how many missed.

Topic- Hot or Not

As part of our topic we have been exploring Africa. We read the story Handa's Hen and investigated life in Kenya.

We pretended we were African animals in our small world and made our own chicks from Handa's Hen.

Next we looked at the Arctic, we explored the types of animals that might live there, then investigated ice by trying to help free the frozen animals as well as making outfits to visit the Arctic in. We also built sledges to help a penguin get to the North Pole and then made one that we could ride ourselves.

We conducted an experiment to see the best way to stay warm. We tried out 5 different ways to stay warm and gave them a number to say how warm they felt afterwards. We then wrote up our finding to show ways to stay warm.

We ran an experiment in Chameleons to find out the fastest way to melt an ice cube. We started by making predictions about which method would cause the ice to melt, before carrying out the experiment. We used our observation skills to keep track of the ice cubes and record when an ice cube had melted.

The Gruffalo's Child

The Chameleon's explored The Gruffalo's child we experimented with shadows to make different creatures using stencils to make shadow puppets. In drawing club we used our imagination to create our own Gruffalo beasts and imagined where they live, what they would eat and who they would meet. 

Forest School

This term in forest school, we focused on how to how to stay warm while outside in winter. We quickly took our coats off to see how cold it is, then we discussed different ways that we could warm ourselves up. We talked about different clothing we could wear and learnt how to do a penguin shuffle to warm our fingers. 

We were very busy while exploring Forest School, we made bird feeders and hung them around the Forest School, working in groups we made dens to by moving big sticks and carefully placing them to make a structure. Using our imagination we made potions and fires, roasting marshmallow on them.

To end our week in Forest School we enjoyed a hot chocolate to explore one last way to stay warm.

Lunar New Year

To celebrate Lunar New Year we explored different parts of Chinese culture. We learnt the story of The Great Race where the Jade Emperor chose the animals who would represent years, using masks we retold the story in the playground. We made Chinese lanterns by cutting and sticking paper and had a Chinese takeaway in the home corner practicing our chop stick skills. To end the week we learnt a Chinese Dragon dance.

Book Club

We have continued to explore our love of reading through our weekly book club. Each Friday we exchange our library books and have a focused quite time to read our new books either by ourself or with a friend.

Class Wide Reward- Animal Parade

For our class wide reward we had an Animal Parade, we picked different animals and made masks. We then had an animal showcase and went into the middle of the circle and pretended to be our animal. We then marched around the classroom using animal movements and finally played some dancing games to animal music.