Blog Week ending 11/02/22
A great week of learning in Pear Class this week!
Please see the tab on our class page to read about what we have been doing this week for Internet Safety Day!
Please consult the Numicon Challenge tab on our class page to discover this week’s homework!
In our RWInc work we have been working hard on our Ditty reading and getting to grips with working with our partners to segment words as we track the words with our lollipop sticks. There is so much progression from September, it really is exciting to see!
I have had several parents email me this week for a little update on how their child is getting on. Please feel free to email or catch one of us at the end of the school day if you would like some information or more ideas of how to specifically help your child at home. Four and five year olds are not always able to articulate what they have been doing at school , sometimes they are just far too tired so we are always happy to fill you in if you have any concerns or queries.
Our maths work this week focused on creating bus number stories adding up to 8. As a class we created our own bus and enjoyed adding sets of boys and sets of girls to create addition number stories. Doing our maths practically like this then enabled us to create these number stories pictorially by drawing the boys and girls onto our buses and working out the addition. This is beginning to further highlight number bonds to 8 to us all. It would be helpful if you spent some time working on number bonds to 8 at home playing the game with your child’s numicon – how many ways can we make 4? 5? 6? 7? and 8? Our maths mastery work has again focused on using stem sentences to look at pictoral number representations , for example stating; ‘Pat has more than Sam’ or ‘Sam has fewer than Pat.’
In our topic work this week we have been investigating the wonder: ‘why are Polar Bears white?’ This time we visited a different region called the Arctic during our discovery time, but learnt that because the Arctic is also very cold and wintry like Antarctica, Polar bears adapt to their habitat and their fur looks white to help them to camouflage into the snow! Did you know that Polar Bears are actually black and their fur is not even white really, but is actually translucent?! As part of this work we took part in an experiment looking at how a Polar Bear is able to stay warm in the freezing cold Arctic – we put our own hands in some blubber (lard), inside an icy bucket and timed how long before we felt the cold water. The blubber really helped to keep our hands warm!
We also enjoyed reading the story The Polar Bear and the Snow Cloud. A lovely story about a snow cloud that tries to help a little polar bear by making animal shapes out of snow, but they’re not real and the little polar bear feels very alone. Just when he is about to give up hope, he spies another little bear just like him, but this little polar bear is real… a friend at last! As a class we discussed how important it is to keep trying and sometimes this is the same with our friendships in Pear Class. In response to this story we all thought about what we thought might be inside a magical snow cloud. We really are huge fans of witches in Pear class as they once again featured quite highly – we told some fantastic stories about these witches and most of us are now also able to write our character’s name independently!
Later in the week we recapped our prior learning about the meaning of the beat(the heartbeat of music), the pitch (how high or low notes go and the tempo (the speed of the music). We enjoyed listening to Horn concerto and discussing as a class is the tempo quick or slow? Is it the same all the way through or does it change? Maybe you could listen to some music as a family this weekend and see if you can use this key vocabulary to discuss some different pieces of music?
Our PHSE work during Jigsaw this week focused around dream jobs and What would we need to do now to help us get that job in the future? What things do we need to learn to help us achieve our dream job? It was really interesting listening to the children’s ideas and what they think they would like to work as in the future. It would be great if you could discuss your jobs with your children and the steps you took to get to where you are now. We all agreed that whatever job the children ended up doing they would have to work very hard during their time at school!
We hope that you have a lovely weekend - who knows we may get a sprinkling of the white stuff!
The Pear Class Team