Blog week ending 10.6.22
This half term sees Pear class learning all about our beautiful coasts in Northumberland, looking at features of a beach and thinking about what a day out at the seaside looked like in the past. We started this week by thinking about what we already know about the seaside and made a class list. We will come back to this at the end of the term and all our extra knowledge to the list! On Monday the children looked closely at seaweed, bladderwrack and shells. They then painted some brilliant observational pictures, thinking about colour and shape and managing brush strokes. In our provision this week we have also had available for the children: seaside cut outs for them to make their own scene, seaside labelling (can children label the features?), large scale loose part beaches, sand castle cutting skills activities, indoor sand and seaside button fine motor activities. The children all enjoyed collecting their lolly sticks as part of the ‘rainbow challenge’.
These activities have run alongside our adult-led sessions where children have been enjoying the story of a singing starfish and creating speech bubbles and looking at the seaside now compared to in the past, looking at similarities and differences.
Our maths this half term has begun with children focusing on ‘doubles’. Pear class now know that this means ‘twice as many’ and they have had busy hands and busy brains doing lots of ‘doubling’ activities this week.
Last half term the focus was on ‘minibeats’ and the children were extremely excited to discover that the class caterpillars have now turned into beautiful butterflies! We set them free on Friday and this raised the discussion about ‘what’s right and fair’. We had some very mature reasons and understanding from many children about the importance of setting our new friends free…well done Pears!
Pear will continue to enjoy P.E with Thomas on Tuesdays and in our class P.E this half-term we are looking forward to our Sports Day in a few weeks time. This week, we focussed on our running and different races.
In music, we enjoyed listening to "Pick up the Pieces" by The Average White Band and talked about whether we liked it being mainly instrumental or not. We also enjoyed playing rhythms on some of the notes on the xylophones.
Our PSHE this week was all about being the best friend I can be. We looked a some friendships we know on TV and films and talked about why these are good friends. We then had some good discussions about what we can do to be good friends. It would be great if you could continue this discussion at home and encourage your child to talk about who their friends are and WHY they like them.
Have a good weekend and see you all next week.
The Pear Class team