We had a wonderful day in the forest today.  We are becoming much more confident in exploring larger areas of the forest and when climbing trees.

Today our main activity was to build Superhero assault courses with our friends.  Some of us had said we wanted to try this last week.  We worked in teams and tried to think about different obstacles that would make a superhero strong and fast.  We also applied some of our new skills in literacy to make signs to tell others what to do at the different obstacles.  Mrs Duncan was very, very proud of us doing this!  We worked hard in teams and solved tricky problems such as making an ‘under’ or ‘over’ obstacle.  We had great fun trying the assault courses out.   We are going to build on this skill in gym next week.  It was a very physical day and we might be very tired tonight! 🙂

Flu vaccine

This week many of us will be being Flu heroes as we get our flu vaccine. Please click on the above link to watch a short video aimed at children to help them prepare for the vaccine.  Unfortunately, I have not been able to get this video to work in class.

We were little scientists today.

Last week we had found out that a steep gradient (our posh word for hills) made our superheroes go faster.  Today we were finding out if different materials on the gradient changed the speed.

We made sensible scientist guesses before we began our experiment. Many of us thought the bumpy material would make our car go fast because the cars would ‘fall into the bumps.’   Some of us thought the towel material would make our car go the fastest because it was flat.  Some of us also thought the wooden material would be the fastest because it was smooth.

We worked in teams to find out if our guesses were correct.  We used towels, bubble wrap, bumpy material and smooth wood on our hills.  We used a stop watch to time which material made the car go fastest.  We tried each one two or more times because Scientists always double check!

We found out that the wooden material was the fastest.  It took only one second for our superhero cars to move down the wooden hill!  We decided it was because the wood was smooth and hard.  We also spoke about forces and decided that a push force is helping the car to move.  We explained that ‘the car doesn’t even move without a push force on the towel!’

We also wrote and drew what had happened in our experiment because Scientists like to always remember what happened.

We are going to explore our experiments further in our play over the next few days.

We finished the afternoon with some games on the computer.  We were really keen for these to go on the Blog so we could play them at home.  Here they are:

Rock and Roll.  Help Caveman Max to decide which force he should use.  Click here.

Forces – push the truck.  Find out if a hard or a soft push makes a difference.  Click here

Forces – push and pull.  We did not have time for this in class.  Follow the instructions in the game to learn more about forces.

We will become more confident with these websites over the next few days.

• Maths.  New learn-its.  These are part of the mental maths work we have been doing in class.  We will get new ‘learn-its’ every few weeks.  Please help your child learn them.  The idea is to become so familiar with them that the children can recite the answer without using their fingers or requiring much thinking time.  I have taught the children that they should be able to answer them just like they would answer, ‘what is your name?’  or ‘what colour is the sky?’ i.e. with very little thought.   As with all P1 homework little and often is best, perhaps a few minutes in the car, whilst making dinner etc.  The learn-its are
  1. 1+1=2
  2. 2+1=3
  3. 2+3 =5

• New sounds and new words.  These will be issued on Tuesday.
• Reading on Monday and Wednesday for the Elephants and Tigers.  Tuesday and Friday for the Pandas.
• Writing practise.  Please help your child to practise writing the letters we are sometimes forming incorrectly: the caterpillar letters (c, a, g, d).  These letters all start with a curly caterpillar that looks like a letter c.  Your child will have a whiteboard and pen in their folders to practise these letters on.  Please ensure these whiteboards are sent back to school every day as we use them on an almost daily basis in class.  Thank you.

Please write a comment or sign the homework diary/reading record to acknowledge that homework has been attempted and that you have seen this post.

Our favourite things this week

• dancing to the Superman song.  Keir
• doing our beat that maths scores with music.  Oliver
• playing outside for golden time.  Erin
• playing on the monkey bars.  Axel
• climbing trees in the forest.  Sancha
• pasta spelling.  Willow

What have you learned this week?

• learning how to make things fly.  Ava
• learning what a WOW word is.  Abbey
• how to climb trees.  Scott
• about superhero costumes.  Enzo
• singing new songs  and climbing on the monkey bars.  Aaryn

What should we do next?

• learn a new topic.  Mara
• get new toys – superhero ones.  Harry
• make houses at the forest.   Angus

Many girls have lost their named cardigans.  We think someone may have taken them home accidentally. Please check the names of the cardigans you may have at home.  Many thanks.

We had a wonderful day in the forest today.  We explored the forest with our friends by playing different hiding games.  We became much more confident as the day went on.

We took our superheroes to the forest and experimented with ways to make them move.  There was lots of fantastic problem solving happening.  Once we had successfully made them move we used stopwatches and timers to see if we could work out how to make them even faster.  We learned that a steeper, straight piece of string made them go fastest.  We also learned that the start should be very high and the end should be low.

We also made our own superhero dens.  They had booby traps, jails, invisible wires, webs, sofas, beds, exercise areas and much, much more.  We worked extremely well together as a team and confidently shared our very elaborate ideas!

We we also developed our skills in keeping ourselves and others safe by carefully climbing very high trees.  This is something we all want to explore further.

We are very excited about visiting the forest tomorrow.

Please remember:

• A small rucksack containing a filled water bottle and a snack
• a waterproof jacket (and trousers if you have)
• School jumper
• an extra layer for the top half – fleece, hoody, jumper etc
• hats and gloves (these can be carried in the rucksack)
• sturdy footwear

All children should come to school wearing all of these clothes tomorrow. This will save time at school and enable us to leave school promptly.  Thank you.

Every Wednesday we explore new sounds and words in a range of different play contexts.  We are learning to become increasingly independent at doing this.  Today our activities included: bingo, glittery g’s, roller paint, shaving foam, mini whiteboards, the story corner and writing.  We also spend some time with Mrs Duncan doing our reading books.

We used roller paints to write our tricky words today.

We also learned how to correctly form the letter ‘g’ by making glittery green g’s.  We found it quite tricky correctly forming this letter.  Please help your child with this if you notice them struggling at home. We call the letter g ‘a caterpillar letter’.  We do the curly c caterpillar first before going straight to the top, then following the path back down and doing a naughty kick.  Your child should be able to do this if they are reminded.  You could try getting them to draw the letter in the air, on your back, in a tray of flour or on a steamy mirror or window.

The children had expressed an interest in finding out about flying Superheroes.  This links well to Science curricular outcomes.

We are going to be focussing on Science superhero activities over the next few weeks with a particular focus on how different forces  such as gravity, pushing and pulling can have an impact upon a moving superhero.

Today we made Superheroes out of kitchen roll tubes.  We found it quite tricky to draw on these as we have not drawn on curved shapes often before.  It required some problem solving! 🙂

We plan to take these Superheroes to the forest on Thursday.  We are going to use string and branches to experiment with how we can make them fly.  We are all very excited about this (Mrs Duncan included!)