21.4.23

Welcome back and what a lovely week it has been with glorious sunshine!

We have hit the ground running with Read Write Inc this week, with some children in new groups and some children consolidating knowledge in their groups from before Easter. We are all becoming so confident with our sounds now!

In our maths learning we have been consolidating our understanding of number bonds to 5 through automatic recall games, whilst some of us have been beginning to notice the number bonds that make up 10. We used Poppy Pear and Fred the frog , some magic beans and a ten frame to create our own number stories. Poppy Pear hid some magic beans and we had to find them and place them on the 10's frame. We then had to look closely at the missing squares and work out how many more magic beans we would need to make 10 - we discovered Fred holding them! Lots of us were able to explain this as a number story. eg 'there were 6 magic beans hidden under the blocks and we have to find 4 more to make 10'. We practised this for the different combinations that make up the bonds to 10. Maybe this weekend you can practise this at home on your walk? There might be four flowers in a field... how many more would need to be planted to make 10?etc. At this stage the children may not be confident to do this to 10 without the aid of a 10 frame but many of us are super clever and we might be able to use our fingers as we know that two hands equals 10.

Our topic work this week has centred around the story 'Sam plants a sunflower'. We recapped our learning at the end of last term where we went on a spring hunt to look for signs of spring and noticed that lots of flowers have started to grow, the days are brighter and warmer and we can hear birds in the sky and grass being cut. We revisited our key vocabulary roots, shoots and buds that we were introduced to when we planted our sunflower seeds. In the story, Sam plants a sunflower and the sunflower first grows a root. Unfortunately none of our sunflowers we planted before Easter have taken and we think maybe the seeds we had picked from a sunflower in the Autumn had dried out a little too much. We have planted some more and we look forward to seeing the cycle the sunflower takes as our sunflower grows. We have however, had some success with our planted conker seed and the apple seeds we used from our apples at snack time - we can see little shoots growing up from the soil and a stem and some leaves on our planted conker seed.
 
We were introduced this week to a famous artist called Vincent Van Goph. He was famous a long time ago for his paintings and is particularly know for his painting 'sunflowers' where he painted sunflowers using 3 tints of yellow. We tried to recreate this painting - we know that to create a tint you add white but to create a shade you would add black. As a class we mixed 3 different tints to use in our painting. These paintings excitingly, will be judged by the school art council and may be selected as a potential winner in the Alnwick in Bloom competition.  As we painted we thought about the different parts that make up the flower and were able to label our pictures with stem, leaves, seeds, and petals. This key vocabulary was introduced to us in Nursery and many of us have managed to remember it. 
 
In drawing club we drew the life cycle of the sunflower that we read about in the story, we know now that flowers come from buds and that roots grow down into the soil to anchor the plant and to act as a straw to soak up all of the water and nutrients from the soil, at this point it becomes a seedling. After this in the story, the sunflower grows a root, then a stem and leaves, then it becomes an adult plant with a bud, before blossoming into a sunflower! As we saw in the Autumn months, the sunflower then begins to wilt and it's flowers and seeds fall off starting the process of seed dispersal and the cycle begins again. The children are so excited to watch the germination of seeds in action so we have also placed some bags with broad beans on our display so that we are able to see the seed turn into a seedling.
 
We have also been very busy outside in the garden tidying up our planting beds and weeding. We have planted some potatoes, lettuce, carrots and radishes and we cant wait to watch them grow. The children have been learning in the process that it is very important to nurture these seeds and many of us were shocked that this is how our vegetables start off and that they go through the same life cycle as a sunflower! We know that our planted produce and flowers will need water and oxygen and the soil will provide them with food so we will be taking turns to give our seeds a good drink on these hot and summer days!

Our ‘Charanga’ this week started us on a journey of ‘funk’ where we listened to the very jazzy ‘Big Bear Funk’ by Joanna Mangona. We enjoyed dancing to this and clapping the rhythm out, as well as clicking our fingers, stamping our feet and patting our knees.

We learnt a new song- ‘Things for fingers song’ and revisited some of our nursery rhymes from last term too!

Our RE learning this half term is based on a multifaith unit- ‘What stories are special and why?’ and this week we listened to the parable ‘The boy who cried wolf’ and we identified some of our own feelings in this story and acted it out using some masks too. We thought about and discussed how the villagers were feeling at the beginning and why we thought the boy told lies. We then realised it is always best to be honest. We had a bit of fun with a game of ‘pass the button’ where we had to be very honest!



This half term our ‘Jigsaw’ learning is based around ‘relationships’. Piece 1 this week saw us think about ‘My Family and Me!’ Firstly, we thought about our families and then we all thought about some of the jobs we might do in our families such as making our own beds, beginning to put on our own shoes, help to set the table and so on. We talked about how it is important that everyone in a family works together and helps each other.


Have a lovely weekend,


The Pear Class Team

 
Exceptional Explorers planting and tending to our garden/ our growing plants and exploring the parts of flowers!
Amazing Artists creating our Van Goph inspired masterpieces to be revealed soon!
Mastering Mathematicians!