Blog Week ending 06.05.22
We have had a (shorter) action packed week in Pear Class this week!
RWInc continues to go very well in our individual groups. This week the children have learnt to follow some new commands so that Mrs Horne-Smith has been able to save her voice. You might like to try it at home... hold up 1 finger and see what they do, then 2 and then 3!
In maths this week we have been gaining confidence with teen numbers. We recapped our learning from last week and the understanding that teen numbers are comprised of 1 ten and different amounts of units. This concept is difficult to understand so we teach it using concrete manipulatives, giving the children lots of time to build and compose teen numbers so that they are able to recognise the pattern that a teen number is always comprised of 10 of something first and then we count on to make four...teen or six....teen etc. We found it tricky that although the 1 that represents the ten is the first number written in a teen number, we say the digit first. We spent a lot of time modelling and recapping numbers to 20 by building the group of ten first and then the ones. We did this using the ten frames first as the children were able to see the 'full' ten frame before they filled the second ten frame with the digit amount. We then developed this understanding by taking it into different contexts and using different concrete resources; numicon, multilinks and loose parts. We will continue to refine and consolidate our understanding of this over the next few weeks.
Our topic this week centred around learning all about the life cycle of butterflies. Following on from our learning last week we recapped our new vocab- metamorphosis (the change of on thing into another). Then reception children had a go at drawing the life cycle of a butterfly and writing some facts they have learnt. If you ask your child they should now be able to tell you the stages that butterflies and frogs go through before they are fully grown! See if they can use our vocabulary: egg, larva/caterpillar, chrysalis/cocoon to explain this to you. We enjoyed creating our list of wonders that we would spend the week trying to find the answers to. We wondered how butterflies eat, why we do not see them in the winter and enjoyed engaging in some sustained thinking around the question 'why do caterpillars build themselves a chrysalis?' There were some wonderful examples of critical thinking here from Pear Class. One child thought that the caterpillar knew he was going to have to make a lot of changes and so needed to have a long rest and didn't want other animals to see him and eat him before he was able to change and grow his wings so he could fly away! We are becoming very good at developing our own questioning skills.
Excitingly, we had a visit from some furry friends this week. We had a lovely carpet session referring back to our discussion from last week about how we weren't always this big and we discussed how some insects like butterflies go through a physical metamorphosis (physical change in their life cycle,) but that we as humans don't go through a physical change as we stay the same with a head, two legs, two arms etc as we grow and get bigger, but that we do go through a metamorphosis in terms of being a child is very different to being an adult. adults minds are very different from children's minds. We decided that animals like sheep, cows and pigs are not like butterflies either, but they do grow bigger and they do have different names when they are babies. We listed some names of these animals as babies: cows, calves, piglets, chicks etc and discovered that as a class our favourite baby animal was a lamb, which was very lucky...
We so enjoyed our discovery in Apple Class garden and all of us (if we wished) enjoyed stroking the lambs but we made sure to wash our hands very well after. Maybe you can look for some other baby animals in the fields over the weekend and see how many the children can list?
Pear class have been busy doing some dancing in PE this week. They did really well at trying to copy the moves and we had some great ideas for our own moves too!
In music we have been busy learning the names of some of the common percussion instruments, such as triangle, guiro, maracas and djembe drum. We also enjoyed listening to "I Feel Good" by James Brown.
Our PSHE session this week focussed on making friends. We had a lovely discussion baout what makes a good friend. It would be great if next time you are playing with new people (such as at the park or a party) you could add to the journal how your child interacts with new children and makes friends.
In other news, we practised our handwriting, musical skills (following a beat, rhythm, singing), fine motor skills, reading and so much more.
Don't forget to check out this weeks maths homework and spellings under the home learning section of pear class page on the website.
If you have any boxes, tubes, containers etc lying around please could you bring them into school next week for some junk modelling fun?
Thank you to those of you who have sent us pictures of the children when they were babies and little - please keep them coming!
Have a great weekend,
The Pear Class Team
Our visit from the lambs!
Mastering mathematicians!