Who can believe it is two weeks left of our summer 1 term?!
We have been nbusy as usual this week in Pear Class. In our maths learning we have revisited repeating patterns but this time we have extended our learning to cover more complex patterns such as ABBA and ABC etc. Understanding patterns is such an important skill in Reception as it helpes children to make predictions about what comes next and form logical connections, an important foundation for later mathematical reasoning.
In our topic learning this week we have moved on from our learning about the growth of plants and vegetables and have begun to learn about those minibeasts in our garden who play such an important role in our food chain. We started by listing the minibeasts that we are familiar with and considering where we have found them in our own experience. we went out onto our school field and began to explore under log, in between holes, beneath the soil etc and we found a huge variety of wrigglies!
We discovered that all of the minibeasts that we found were in dark, damp places, hidden from predators. Lots of the minibeast we found looked like the environment where we found them - the worms are brown like the soil, the woodlice are brown like the wood and the bees are colourful like the flowers. We know from our earlier learning that this is camouflage.
We learnt a lot of facts about minibeasts this week by watching and reading non-fiction. We know that all minibeasts are invertebrate which means that they have no back bone. Some minibeasts are arachnids (spiders ) and have two body parts and 8 legs and some minibeasts are insects - they have 3 body parts: the head, thorax and abdomen. We were able to choose from a selection of minibeasts the ones that fitted either the spider or insect classification and we sketched out and carefully labelled these bugs.
In Pear class we are continually reviewing our learning and recapping what we have been learning and finding out about. Towards the end of each week, we all enjoy completing our 'floorbook' of our learning journey, based around our time in Pear. Our floorbooks are a great resource- full of photos, captions, quotes and key vocabulary so that we are always 'on top of our learning' and refreshing our memories all of the time! We love cutting out the many photos and practising our scissor skills along the way!
We are already onto 'Step 4' of our Big Bear Funk musical theme in Charanga! We are getting exceptionally great at keeping the beat of the song! To warm up our musical brains this week, we listened to 'My Promise' by Earth Wind & Fire. We have also been practising our ‘Things for fingers song’ which we are excited to share in our class assembly. Our class assembly will be on Thursday 15th June at 2.30. Please do come along if you can!
Our RE learning this week was focussed around The Jews and the story of Hannukah. We identified some of our own feelings in this story and talked about some of the things this story teaches believers. We enjoyed making our Hannukah Menoras.
We continued to think about 'falling out and bullying' in our Jigsaw session this week and we have been exploring the impact of unkind words. We sorted out kind phrases and unkind phrases into the 'sprarkly' and 'not sparkly' pile and Jigsaw Jerrie Cat helped us to pause, take a deep breath in and out to feel sparkly. We all know that it's so important to 'think before we speak'.
We are all so fantastic at being kind to our friends and adults who work with us!
We said 'good bye and good luck!' to our friend Lily this week as she leaves us to have a fantastic adventure! Lily, we have absolutely LOVED having you in our class and we know you have had a brilliant time too! Keep in touch with us- we would all love to hear from you!
Have a lovely weekend (and a lovely new start to Lily),
The Pear Class Team
Minibeast Hunting!
Mastering Mathematicians!