We took advantage of a beautiful sunny day to have some pod time. We had an obstacle course, an amazing car, a musical performance and a kitchen among other creative set ups. You can see some of our fun in the photos.

This week some of us applied our addition and subtraction skills in problem solving word problems. It is very important that we are able to apply our understanding of maths in many different ways: analysing word problems, breaking the problem into chunks, deciphering the language to work out what operation to use, using our logic and reason to find the answer and talking about the process are important skills we are developing. Pages of sums, which we call calculations, don’t show our ability to apply our skills in a useful and real-life manner. We enjoy showing our understanding in making, doing, talking and writing!
Some of us continued to work on the part, part, whole method of problem solving which really challenged us this week and you can see a photo of this below. You can set us challenges like this at home. We love doing them.
Some of us continued to impress with our ability to add and subtract in 10s and talk about the value of a digit.
Again you can support your child by lots of quick fire addition and subtraction, number bonds recall and number talks as well as online games and challenges. We enjoy talking about patterns in number too.

Kapla is our new classroom resource that uses imagination, logic, mathematics, physics, fine motor skills, concentration and team work. It is natural and tactile and the children already love it!

Some of us continued to develop our knowledge of subtraction with using Numicon to clearly see the process of borrowing a 10. Numicon really helps us to visualise what can be a tricky concept to grasp. Building, talking and writing about what and why really helps our remembering, understanding and applying skills! We also used our knowledge of fact families and the relationship between addition and subtraction to do simple algebra, using what information we have in an equation to find the unknown number and then use this to solve the next problem.
Other children continued to practise their knowledge of place value and partitioning numbers into tens and ones, using Numicon. We are also becoming more skilled at adding and subtracting a ten from a given number and this is something that can be regularly practised at home to build up speed, confidence and accuracy.

This week we combined our knowledge of rainforest creatures, their ability to escape predators and catch prey and our learning about the rainforest layers to create a new rainforest creature! We had to research using our non fiction texts and the active wild website to combine aspects of different animals, birds and insects and understand and use words such as ‘appearance’ ‘habitat’ and ‘diet. Scientists believe that many creatures are still to be discovered in the rainforests so maybe our creatures really do exist!