Mrs Duncan was very impressed with our knowledge of 3D shapes today.  Almost all of us could identify some differences between 2D and 3D shapes.  We all tried to describe different shapes whilst playing a hiding game.

Our main maths activity today was to sort 3D shapes into hoops depending on whether they were good at rolling or stacking.  We had a lot of discussion about how the hoops should be positioned to make sure all shapes would have somewhere to go.  We learned that this was called a Venn diagram.  We had to do some tricky problem solving to find out which shapes were good for building, rolling or both.  The cone was the trickiest shape to position.  Erin and Ava decided it should go outside of the hoops because it wasn’t good for rolling or stacking.  Good thinking girls!

Today the pandas and tigers were learning about the ch sound.  The elephants were learning about another way of making the ee sound: ea.  The most popular activity today was the iPads.  We were using them to reinforce all of the letters in the alphabet.  The app we used was alpha blocks – you could try downloading at home if you wish.

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Here are the videos of our volcano experiments.  Apologies for the poor video quality – the children were desperate for these to go on the blog.  It was challenging to put the mentoes in whilst filming! 🙂

Click here to watch the video.

After the experiment the children enjoyed having free exploration with the coke and mentoes to see if they could make any more eruptions occur.  They found out that once the experiment had happened once you could not get it to happen again with the same coke and mentoes.  The children decided that this was because the mentoes had ‘got all of the fizz out.’  What clever little scientists!

Zumba was a huge hit with all of the children last week.  Here is a small selection of photos and videos from our Zumba session.  Unfortunately, many of the videos are too large to upload onto the blog.  They will be available to view on the open day.

Please click here to watch a short video of us enjoying our Zumba lesson.  We will have another lesson this Thursday!

We have been finding it difficult to solve very small disputes with our friends.  In circle time we played games and chatted to help us get better at this.  We were given a variety of problems and we had to try and solve them with our friends.  We were reminded that if any problem, big or small, is worrying us a lot we can always tell Mrs Duncan.

Today we have been learning about how the dinosaurs died out.  We did some experiments to find out more about volcanoes.  We loved doing the mentoes volcano experiment.

The children were desperate for the instructions to go on the blog so that they could try the experiment at home.  They helped me write the instructions written below.

What you need

• A bottle of diet coke
• sweeties – mentoes
• a big space outside

What to do

1. Put the bottle on a flat place on the ground
2. Take the lid off
3. Take the mentoes out of the packet and put them in your hand
4. Put some mentoes in the bottle
5. Run!

Top Safety tips

• A grown-up must be with us
• The grown up must put the mentoes in
• You must take the lid off

Today we were developing our skills in typing using Clicker 6.  We all managed to type the name of our favourite dinosaur.  We also changed the style, size and colour of our writing.  We were most excited about printing our work! We thought Mrs Duncan was a magic teacher when she said ‘Abracadabra’ and her writing game shooting out of the printer! 😃

Here is the finished product:

We are going to use this for some data handling maths work next week.

Have a great long weekend everyone! 😃

We have been learning that problem solving means doing very clever thinking to fix a problem.  Today we developed our problem solving skills using the iPads.  We used a fantastic app called ‘Free flow.’ We had to match up the colours – it got very tricky once we made our way through the higher levels.  Some of us got up to level 27! If you are going to download this app at home please be aware that it does have some adverts from external apps so you may wish to supervise iPad time.

We also used the BeeBots.  We had to program them to move in different directions.  We are going to explore these further in the play contexts over the next few weeks.  The BeeBots are available as an app – it is great for problem solving!

Our last activity was using different construction that was more challenging to fit together.  The marble run was particularly popular!