Blog 7th February

We’re almost at the half way point in our Plum Class year!

As usual, it’s been a hard working week in the classroom.   We’ve been meteorologists this week as we’ve monitored the weather outside, kept a record of the temperature and studied the weather forecast.  When we looked at the long range forecast we were a little bit excited to learn that it might snow next week.  It would be great if you could follow the weather forecast at the weekend.  This has linked into some map work as we’ve looked at where we live in the UK.  The children have learnt to pinpoint Alnwick on the map and on Friday we learnt that this is in the north of England.  We used a compass to identify north, south, east and west.  In addition to this, we continued to explore the directional language of forwards, backwards left and right as we followed a track on the playground whilst riding on our buggy boards.  This was lots of fun!  Maybe you could make or follow simple maps and directions at the weekend.  A treasure hunt would be great fun!

We tried something a little bit different in our afternoon sessions this week.  I asked the children about the things that they wanted to learn about, do and play.  They had lots of ideas and we’ve tried to cover some of these in our independent activities each afternoon.  The children have had a wonderful time making potions, creating Jurassic Parks, playing with dolls and building with lego.  The children had many more ideas which they shared with us.  We’ll create opportunities to explore these ideas in the coming weeks.

In our mathematical work, we’ve been subtracting this week.  As well as taking away practically and visually with numicon, we’ve been counting backwards on numberlines to solve calculations.  The children are developing a really good understanding of the process of subtraction and explain this confidently.  We’ve had a special table on the go each day in our number sessions called ‘show me what you know’ and the children have taken the opportunity to develop and record their own mathematical thinking around place value, addition, subtraction and counting in 2s. We’ve learnt the names of two new shapes this week – a pentagon which has 5 sides and a hexagon which has 6 sides.

In our PE session, we had three activity stations to explore – the climbing station, the rolling station and the jumping station.  In the rolling station, I encouraged the children to have a go at forward rolls and teddy bear rolls. Maybe you could practise these at home this weekend.

See you all on Monday for the last week of the half term.  Don’t forget it’s a training day on Friday 14th February.