20.1.23

What a snowy week it has been here at Swansfield! We have enjoyed every minute! But, before I get onto our Winter afternoon fun, see what we have spent our mornings doing...

In our maths work this week, we thought carefully about ways to make 5. We sang "five speckled frogs" song and the used the part, whole, model to help us understand partitioning. Please find a part, whole sheet attached for you to print and practise with your child at home. If you don't have access to a printer, you can easily draw this model on a large bit of paper. You can use anything within the circles that takes your child's interest - shells, cars, dinosaurs etc. At the moment the emphasis is just on explaining the practical process, if your child is confident to record their calculation that is fantastic but not the expectation at this stage.

 For our part, whole model we started by looking at our whole amount of frogs in the large circle at the top - in this case it was 5. 2 of our frogs jumped onto the log (the first small circle) and then the remaining 3 jumped into the pond (the second small circle). We were then able to say the stem sentence '2 frogs on the log and/added to 3 frogs in the pond equals 5 frogs altogether. We practised this several different ways with different amounts of frogs with the emphasis every time on the fact that the two parts added together gave us the answer(equals) for the whole amount. Maybe you could work on this at home with hula hoops and bean bags? or why not draw your own part whole model on paper?

In our topic work this week we have been investigating the wonder: ‘why are Polar Bears white?' Following on from our learning last week around the season winter and how animals in Alnwick adapt to these weather changes by hibernating and migrating, we travelled further afield in our learning to the Northern Hemisphere. We visited a region called the Arctic during our discovery time and learnt that because the Arctic is  very cold and wintry, Polar bears adapt to their habitat and their fur looks white to help them to camouflage into the snow! Did you know that Polar Bears are actually black and their fur is not even white really, but is actually translucent?! As part of this work we took part in an experiment looking at how a Polar Bear is able to stay warm in the freezing cold Arctic – we put our own hands in some blubber (lard), inside an icy bucket and timed how long before we felt the cold water. The blubber really helped to keep our hands warm!

We also enjoyed reading the story The Polar Bear and the Snow Cloud. A lovely story about a snow cloud that tries to help a little polar bear by making animal shapes out of snow, but they’re not real and the little polar bear feels very alone. Just when he is about to give up hope, he spies another little bear just like him, but this little polar bear is real… a friend at last! As a class we discussed how important it is to keep trying and sometimes this is the same with our friendships in Plum class

As well as exploring Wintery weather in the Arctic, the snow came at just the right time and we had so much fun getting out and about exploring our school grounds in the snow! We noticed lots of ice, frost, icicles and bare trees. Check out the lovely Winter pictures below! 

At Swansfield Park Primary we love finding out about other cultures and customs. We have been listening to a South African lullaby towards the end of the week called 'Thula Baba'. We decided that it was a very calm and relaxing song to listen to and thought about the reason why this would be- so that babies can drift off to sleep peacefully. We responded well to this piece of music by making a gentle beat and swaying from side to side. Last week we used musical egg shakers and glockenspiels to play along to the songs we heard. This week we carried on with this and tried to play along to the beat and in time with the music 'If you're happy and you know it.' Practise makes perfect! We also had great fun listening to and joining in with the songs 'Wind The Bobbin Up' and 'Rock-A-Bye Baby'. We are learning more and more songs as the weeks go by!

In our weekly RE session, we reflected on our learning from last week and we continued to find out a little bit more about Christians as part of our 'World Religion Day' activities. We thought about how and when Christians like to think about their creator. We had some help from our RE doll 'Tessa' who noticed that people use the name ‘God’ a lot at the church she goes to. They sing songs about God too. We found out that Christians attend a 'service' at church, usually on a Sunday, to sing and pray to God and learn from the Bible together.  We enjoyed singing the hymn ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands’.

In our Jigsaw session this week we all sat calmly in a circle and we know about the importance of being calm in our 'calm me' start to our sharing time. After we were calm, we remembered about being 'respectful' to our Plum class friends and letting everyone have a turn to share their thoughts and feelings. We thought about a time when we didn't give up until we achieved our goals and told these to our friends. We then drew some pictures in our class floorbook to record our learning and to reflect upon during our time in plum class.

As always we enjoyed sharing our reading books with an adult towards the end of the week.

As well as our adult led activities we had a lovely time exploring our provision and leading our own learning through self directed play. Another week of busy fingers and busy brains for us!

Have a lovely weekend- Miss Freeman