Week five- 10.02.23

We have had a lovely artistic week in Pear Class 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 and calm and winter often feels cold and bare. We produced our own winter inspired artwork by mixing our own cold colour combinations. We learnt about shades of colours by lightening paint to create different shades of blues and greens. We also explored darkening colours by adding black to the cold colours we were using. We carefully copied the brush strokes we could see in Kandinsky's paintings to create our own abstract backgrounds.

In drawing club we extended our learning of the story the magic sky by thinking up other magical things we might be able to see in the sky such as unicorns, princess's and some strange and unique things like magical sandwiches! In drawing club now we are all adding lots of details to our creations and children are either writing words or sentences to describe what they have drawn which is wonderful to see!

In maths this week we have been consolidating our learning in the alive in 5 unit of work; mastering our learning of number bonds to 5, the concpet of zero and the language around weight and capacity.

We have not had our usual RWInc sessions as we have been completing our 5 weekly assessments. Pear Class children are all doing amazingly well and there is so much progress to see!

 In our Charanga music session this week we “conga’d” our way round Pear class again and again! We had so much fun! We loved how this song made us feel happy and ‘uplifted’. We all decided that this song was a lively song with a fast pulse and moved to the beat! We have been focussing on many songs this half term in our Charanga time: Wind The Bobbin Up, Rock-A-Bye Baby, Five Little Monkeys and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Not forgetting the action songs If You’re Happy And You Know It and Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes. We sang, played and danced along to some of these this week and rehearsed our performances using the instruments. We are going to spend some time reflecting on our performances next week as the unit comes to an end. We recorded a Pear class video at the start of the unit and will record once at the end of the unit- next week- and we will see if we have improved and talk about the reasons for this. We spend lots of time revisiting our learning in Pear class and we like to make links in our learning with the help of our adults. 

 

We are very good at caring for our friends in Pear class and have been thinking lots about this in our everyday lives. We spent some time this week learning about the importance of caring for our world. We talked about what people do to mess up the world and what they do to look after it. This was in our RE session. We found out that Christians believe that God loves the world he has made and has put humans in charge of caring for his creation; it is a big responsibility. We then thought about how people who are Christians should care for the world as well as people who are not Christians. Everybody should care for the world in which we live! Pear class decided that our world is precious but considered ‘how is our world sometimes messed up?’ We enjoyed a powerpoint about looking after our environment and discussed our thoughts on this. We then did some very important jobs about ‘protecting our planet’ where we did some sorting, cutting and sticking with some pictures to show our understanding about this topic.



It is incredible the progress we have made with our reading skills this year! Please make sure reading and library books are in school on Tuesday ready for your child’s reading session. New books will be sent out towards the end of week once your child has been heard to read. They choose their own library book and are very excited to bring it home to share so we encourage you to spend some time reading your child ‘s book together. Can they spot any familiar words? Can they maybe sound some words out? Can they predict what will happen next? Or quite simply, just let them listen to you read to them; share that love of reading together. 

 

We thought about the ‘bigger versions’ of ourselves this week in our Jigsaw session and are beginning to understand the link between what we learn now and the jobs we might like to do when we are older. We went on an exciting journey into the future in our space rockets and zoomed through time! We looked in a bag containing all the picture word cards of jobs done by adults. We then pretended to be adults and we acted out the job on that card for the other children to guess. We thought about all the different skills we might need for different jobs when we are older  e.g. if we picked out being a teacher we would need to learn to read and write now; if we picked out builder, we would need to know about measuring. We then thought about ‘what would we need to do now to help us get that job in the future?’ and ‘what things do we need to learn to help us achieve our dream job?’ We will be whatever we want to be; the future is ours and we are Perfect Pears!

 

It’s never too early for children to learn about the importance of internet safety and that’s what we did on Thursday as part of ‘Internet Safety Day’. We listened to the story 'Penguinpig' which is about staying safe online and we then drew some fantastic pictures, wrote some sounds, words and sentences about our pictures!

We also found out about how important it is to stay safe on the internet with the help of Buddy the Dog. We watched and listened to a story about Buddy the Dog helping a little boy to use his tablet safely. This got us thinking and we talked about how we can use technology sensibly and safely. We loved doing some activities based on this story and we did some brilliant colouring too! Here is the song we sang to remind ourselves to stay safe online:

 

Buddy’s ‘Use Your Tablet Safely’ Song

(Sung to the tune of Frère Jacques)

Ask your grown-up, 

Ask your grown-up, 

Ask for help! 

Ask for help!

Use your tablet safely, 

Use your tablet safely, 

Woof, woof, woof! 

Woof, woof, woof!





Have a lovely weekend, 

 

The Pear Class Team



Amazing Artists!
Later in the week!