January has flown by and we have been as busy as ever in Plum Class!
We've continued with our winter wonders this week and we have been learning all about Antarctica! We began by finding out some important facts. Did you know Antarctica is in the southern hemisphere and is much colder than the Arctic? Did you know that in Antarctica there are lots of types of penguins? Did you know that no humans live in Antarctica, unlike the Arctic. Plum class do!!
In response to our wonder 'why are penguins black and white?' We enjoyed watching lots of non-fiction fact videos and looking at the globe and some Atlas books to look at the habitat of Antarctica, spending time thinking about why Penguins were all the same colours with none of the bright colours we see in our British Blue Tits. We discovered how Penguins have adapted to the cold, icy and watery climate of Antarctica by countershading - (having a black back and a white chest) to camouflage and hide from Predators in the water.
The story "the magical snow garden" was stimulus for our learning this week and led our focus throughout the week. We enjoyed making our own magical snow gardens and had lots of fun in drawing club letting our imaginations run wild.
The children wanted to know more about penguins and so we watched a very useful video that told us various about different species of penguins, what they eat, how they stay warm in the water, how many eggs they lay and so much more. We decided to make fact files to tell people what we had learnt. The children used their "fred fingers" to help them sound out and spell the words they wanted to write. Excellent work everyone!
The children found it very interesting that the Antarctica is much colder than the Arctic so with that in mind we decided to do an icy experiment. What would melt ice the fastest? We used salt, sugar, hot water and cold water. We also used small wooden hammers. We all predicted that hot water would melt ice the quickest because "its hot and hot stuff melts cold stuff". We later found out that salt was the speediest way. We then compared this to gritters who spread salt on the roads regularly to melt the ice.
In our maths work this week we have continued to develop our knowledge of number bonds to 5 and have enjoyed exploring how 5 is made up of lots of smaller numbers. For example, 1+ 1+1+1+1 or 1+2+2 or 1+1+1+2. We used coloured cubes, counters and most importantly 5 frames to help us record. We also used numicon as a way to show our number bonds.
We got on our dancing shoes to 'Charanga' on Thursday where the children listened and responded to 'ABC' by The Jackson 5: Play the song. We played some fun copycat rhythm games and created our own sounds with our voices, egg shakers and glockenspiels. We practised our 'If you're happy and you know it' and 'Rock-A-Bye Baby' songs from last week with our instruments. The children had so much fun!
In Jigsaw this week we continued to ponder the questions 'what will happen if we don’t try and give up easily on everything?' and 'what would you do? How can you achieve your goal?' We had some brilliant ideas and we are recognising the importance of building up our resilience.
Last week we found out that Christians believe that God created everything in the world- the wonderful, interesting and the puzzling too. In our RE session we thought about some of the things in our world that are 'puzzling' to us. We were a bit puzzled about why we have wasps and nettles in our world as they sting us. There were some other things that puzzled us too; 'why do giraffes have long necks?' 'Why are there cobras in the world because they bite?'
It's been a busy week in Plum class! Have a well deserved weekend everyone.