What a great way to learn more about castles by visiting Claypotts castle.

Our guides were the Strachan family who lived there 450 years ago ( super pupil guides from Claypotts castle primary school ) who told us all about their home.

It was great fun going up and down the spiral staircase. We needed to stay on the “pizza crust” part.

The servants’ stairs were even trickier to use!

We visited the great hall.

The fireplace in the kitchen was huge!

We wondered what it would have been like to sleep in a bed with a curtain around it.

In the top room of the castle we saw how the roof was made, listened to a story and played giant’s keys:

Outside we thought that people might have been shorter in the olden days. The door looked quite small and Mrs Taylor only just managed to stand in the doorway without hitting her head.

Outside we found the spy holes:

There was so much to talk about:

There was so many new facts to learn:

There was so much to see:

We gave our outing the thumbs up!

We had great fun last week, collecting sticks to construct a 3D cube or cuboid. We carefully selected sticks that were straight, not too thick and not too thin.

Back in class we worked with our partner to construct a 3D shape.

We ran out of time before playtime and Mrs Taylor learned that play dough dries out in the sunshine and under the overhead heaters, but we managed to take photos of the shapes before they collapsed!

We are all looking forward to our outing…….

We completed jigsaws of the castle , so we can identify it and learn more about the features.

We played with wooden bricks (children long ago wouldn’t have had electronic toys and may have played with bits of wood). We made up games from sticks and stones and pine cones.

We also looked at photos of features of the castle and tried to work out what these features  might have been used for.

Well done on winning medals at dancing!

What a fantastic model!

We had great fun on World Book Day. Don’t forget to exchange your token for a free book at  some supermarkets or bookshops.

https://www.worldbookday.com/books/

Today we listened to the story of the runaway pancake. The children in the yellow RWInc group have been reading The gingerbread man this week and discovered that the 2 stories are very similar.

Listen here if you want to hear the stories again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_uljzJOOaU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5ER4npG1lQ

We have been looking at patterns connected to the stories of 10. We discovered the connection between and addition and subtraction, and looked at turn around sums.

Some children worked out the connection between 3 numbers Mrs Taylor had given them. We were so excited to discover these patterns.

Wow! Such imagination has been demonstrated in our castle making. Each child is telling Mrs Taylor about their castle, the shapes they have used, the symmetry in their castle or garden, what they might find inside the castle and features in the castle building itself. They were then given a measuring task connected to the castle. Details will be sent home in Story of Success folders shortly.

We took our learning outside last week to find 3D objects in the playground and then played a find the shape team game.

We took photos of the items we found and made a shape book for our class literacy corner.

Its great fun to have a little dance from time to time:

Today we enjoyed dancing to the happy song from “Despicable Me”.