In English we have been talking about winter words with the focus on words that are nouns. Nouns are naming words – at this level, the names of any person, place, animal or thing. We then differentiated Proper Nouns as being the names of people and places and so they must have capital letters. Our Winter pictures have labels which are nouns.
In Science we have been learning about sound – how sound waves are a vibration and travel through air, water and solids. We also learned about how sound waves look for high sounds and low sounds. In English we discussed ‘sound’ words (onomatopoeia) and made a short story or sentence to match our sound picture.
We had a visit from the RSPCA to discuss caring for pets. Its basis is quality Empathy between owner and animal and the responsibility for this is from the owner. It’s based on the same Golden Rule idea we use for the children – treat others as you would like them to treat you, but modified in concept to fit the animal/owner relationship. Five things to provide for your pet are – Food, Water, Shelter, Friends and Exercise.
In Mathematics we have been working on problem solving tasks. This work is more challenging because it means the children have to apply previously learned knowledge in new and varied situations so it requires some more advanced thinking. It also involves some representations diagrammatically and good organisation to help with accurate counting
In Mathematics the children have been learning about time – the duration of a minute/hour/day/year. Some of this has involved measuring what you can do in a second and compared to a minute or hour. Morning and afternoon and how it is divided by the mid-day and noon time has been discussed and events divided into morning and afternoon (events such as getting up, going to bed, going to school and having dinner).
Some mathematics work this week has centred around different number combinations with the numbers 7,8 9 and 10 and number line work. The children were also asked to try their own number lines which could go forward, backward, diagonally and from different starting points. The connection was made between number lines and History Timelines. In Time different activities were matched to different times and number fluency (no aids) from 1-100 was checked.
In Reading we have been reading a big non-fiction book about Ladybirds. We were interested because we are finding lots of ladybirds at school – so we have been looking at their life cycle, their predators and their habitat. Some Reading comprehension work has focused around ladybirds and one section asked the children to draw a specific picture and add labels.
In these motivational videos for children, the concept of ‘growth mindset’ is explored. They provide strategies to overcome ‘hitting the dip’ moments and are great for helping to develop self-motivational skills.