Blog 24th January

While it’s been a relatively mild week outside, we’ve been considering all things icy and cold in Plum Class.

We began the week by recalling the spectrum of cold colours and using some of these to paint a background for a winter picture.  The children really enjoyed using silver, white and blue for this job.  We asked the children to look very closely at the detail of the shapes of branches on trees.  The children then used charcoal pencils to create intricate and careful trunks and branches.  We were delighted with the results and they are on display for you to enjoy looking at.

On Tuesday, Mrs Grimes showed us two ice mountains and we talked about what would happen to them now that they were out of the freezer.  The children were quick to say that they would melt.  So, we decided to do a little investigation and we put one of the ice mountains outside in our garden and put one on the bench at the back of the classroom.  We talked about what we thought might happen.  After lunch, we measured the amount of water that was in the bottom of each ice mountain bowl and discovered that, in line with our predictions, the one inside had melted more quickly. Together we decided that this was because it was warmer in our classroom and the heat was causing the ice to melt faster.  There were so many great explanations given – we were delighted with all of the children. On Thursday, we looked at some pictures of gritters and talked about their job.  One Plum Class member knew that grit was made with salt.  We talked about the grit melting the ice so that roads were not too slippery.  We then had a go at melting ice with salt ourselves.  This was great fun, but a little chilly on our fingers.  Maybe you could have a go at some icy experiments at home over the weekend.

In our musical work, we’ve been listening to some rather old music this week.  It came from the Baroque era and it was written by George Handel.  He wrote this music about 400 years ago!  We heard trumpets and violins and we also heard an instrument that sounded a bit like a piano.  We discovered that it was a harpsicord.  We looked at some pictures of harpsicords and thought they looked and sounded rather nice!  Maybe you could look at these together at home.  Or, you could listen to some music by George Handel.

At the end of the week, we read the tale of Jack Frost by David Melling.  The children loved talking about all of the magical woodland characters and laughing at the rather smelly goblins.  This story provided the basis for some great writing and imaginative play on Friday morning.

And, if all of that wasn’t enough, we’ve been adding by counting on in our number work.  We have used our Numicon resource to help with this.  We touch the first piece of numicon and say the number and then we count on by touching each hole in the second piece.  Maybe you could add by counting on at home.  Use practical equipment to help and just touch the first set without counting each piece and then count on from there.

Have a great weekend!