Blog Week ending 4/2/22

What hard-workers we've been this week!

 Remember to check out our Numicon Challenge page for the latest activity.  Please upload them to the journals, it's great to see what you're getting up to!

We have all been very impressive in RWInc.  This week, e've enjoyed sharing the Ditty: Get a Hat and our reading is really coming on well.  We've also thought hard about our writing, thinking about the sounds that make up the words, how to form these letters and remembering to leave finger spaces between each word.

In our number work we have focussed on the number 8.  We have looked at how we write the numeral using this rhyme:

"Make an 'S' and do not wait, join it up to make an 8."

As well as focussing on our formation of "8", we have thought about whether other numbers are more or fewer than 8.  We've also reinforced our work on 6 and 7 from last week by looking at numbers which are more and fewer than 6 or 7.  We've had lots of fun using the Numicon to help us practically show this.

This week, our topic focus has been on the colours and feel of Winter. We have really enjoyed reading the story The Magic Sky and talking about the beautiful colours that the Polar Bear discovered in the story. We learnt that these colours were called The Northern Lights and can usually only be seen in places like the Arctic where polar bears live, during certain months of the year. There was lots of interesting discussion about how these colours make us feel and we began to learn that some colours such as red are classed as warm colours and some blues and silvers are classed as cold colours.  We liked talking about the different shades of colours too and began to extend our colour vocabulary to describe the colours we could see (particularly with names such as teal, indigo, minty green, icy blue).  We enjoyed creating our own digital images of the magical sky that we thought the Little Polar Bear might have been looking up at!

To extend our understanding of colours, we enjoyed looking at a painting by a famous artist : Wassily Kadinsky. This artist chose to use lots of colours to portray winter but we discussed how the colours felt cold as winter often feels cold and bare. We produced our own winter inspired artwork by mixing our own cold colour combinations.

Alongside this we have been experimenting with ice. Although we did not discover any ice or frost on our winter hunt last week due to a warmer winter this year, we know that this icy weather might be coming. We all made predictions as to what item would melt the ice the fastest and why we thought that.

Our rhyming and rhythm skills have improved as we've enjoyed singing different nursery rhymes and counting songs.  As a class, we particularly like "5 little monkeys", "5 Green Bottles", "Head, shoulders, knees and toes" and "Jack and Jill". 

Through our PSHE we have been thinking about Obstacles and Support.  We have had a lovely session sharing good things we like about each other and how we feel when we hear nice things said about ourselves.  Why not do something similar as a family: Can your child write down something good about each family member? Can everyone in the family say something good about your child?

Have a lovely weekend,

The Pear Class team