3.3.23
What a lovely first week back we have had in plum class!
This week our maths has focused on the composition of 6,7 and 8 and making these numbers up from smaller groups. We looked at how 6,7,8 can be split into two groups and then worked with loose parts to create three smaller groups, for example, 3 and a 2 and another 3 equals 8 etc.
For our topic learning we have visited another continent, but this time a very hot continent - quite the opposite to Antarctica; Africa! We used the story Mama Panya's Pancakes to explore a country within this continent called Kenya and in this story, the setting was a little village. We enjoyed learning a little bit about the boy in the story and his culture. We found lots of similarities with our own life's here in Alnwick, but also, lots of differences. We explored Kenya using Google Earth and looking through some of our classroom world Atlas' and through this learning we found that the capital city of Kenya is called Nairobi and this is probably much more similar to Alnwick than the little village in the story. Africa is a huge place with lots of things to learn about and we will continue to explore over the next few weeks!
In our facilitated play, we were creating our own representations of the huts the people in the little boy's village lived in. We could see that these huts were only one story, did not have a window and had a roof made out of straw. We used our imaginations and large scale loose parts in Plum Class garden to recreate this setting, some of used branches to create the fire that the neighbours shared in the village, or the market stalls the little boy visited with his mother. Our creations were fantastic!
Our ‘Charanga’ music session on Thursday started with a happy song ‘Lovely Day’ by Bill Withers. We had fun finding the pulse in different ways, clapping, stamping and dancing to the beat too! We really enjoyed finding the pulse in the songs ‘Old Macdonald’ and ‘The wheels on the bus’. We were brilliant at singing along to ‘The Wheels on the bus’.
Our RE topic this half term is ‘Why is Easter special to Christians?’ and we started by thinking about what we know about Easter already. We enjoyed watching how some Christian children celebrate Easter and found out that some people decorate a large cross with flowers. We then decided that we would decorate some flowers to decorate a large cross like they did in church in the video. We thought about Easter and how Christians celebrate the idea of everything coming back to life and so we reflected on new life in flowers, new lambs and Spring chickens being born. We found out that Christians believe that at Easter time, Jesus came back to life too.