This week we continued on with our descriptive setting writing.  Our topic this week was a winter fair with a colourful Christmas tree.  We discussed the picture as a class and used our senses to come up with lots of ideas to describe the setting.  We then worked on including adjectives to make our writing even more detailed.  In maths we focussed on rounding to the nearest 10 and will continue on with this next week.  As the weather is getting colder we painted some fun snowmen pictures which look fantastic up on the classroom walls.

This week we were focussing on non fiction books in reading.  We discussed the different features of them and how they can help us find the information we need.  We then continued on in writing using our senses to describe a setting.

In maths we were working on our multiplication strategies.  We used arrays and grouping to help us find the answers as well as being able to skip count.  We will continue to practise these to improve our recall.

Our topic just now is Body Systems and that has been our focus in our creative play area,  So far we have named some of the main bones in our bodies,  looked at our major organs and their function and learned how our eye works.

In Art we were using line and tone to draw a detailed eye and also had a go at some optical illusion art.

Last week for Halloween we had began making 3D haunted houses.  They were tricky to make and so took us a little longer than we thought so began this week finishing them.

In maths we continued on with measuring this time using a metre stick and we were also trying to estimate lengths.

We began our block of tennis this week in PE and starting by getting use to holding and controlling a raquet.

Lastly we began our new topic which is the Body Systems.  We made our own skeleton which we will label next week.

This week we had lots of fun with Halloween themed activities.  During our Active Play sessions we gave all our games a spooky theme.

In literacy we learned how to write an acrostic poem.  We then made our own using the word Halloween and shared these with the rest of the class.  They were all fantastic and most had a very clear theme about getting lots of sweets.

In maths we were learning about measurement.  We used a ruler to accurately measure our broomsticks in cm.  We also continued to practise our adding and subtraction strategies.

On Thursday we had fun with some Halloween themed dancing and even the staff got involved trying to show off our best moves.

We have had a great week back in P3a.  In maths we have been working hard using numberlines as a subtraction strategy and have made great progress. In art we were learning about tints and shades.  We began practising being able to make these and then used our skills to create a piece of art.  You will see the finished artwork next week.

On Tuesday we learned some new games during our active play.

We also began our lessons on Diwali, learning about Rama and Sita and why it is called the festival of lights.

On Friday we had lots of fun outdoors learning about Halloween animals with Donald from Wildside Nature.  He gave us lots of interesting facts and the children got the chance to move around like the animals.  They especially loved learning about bats and how they use echo location to find their food.  Both Mrs Potter and Donald were very impressed at their enthusiasm and how much the children could remember from his last visit.

This was a slightly shorter week but we still managed to get lots done.  In writing we have continued on with our discursive writing and the children are making great progress. We were also using different activities in spelling to recap all our phoneme sounds.

It was week 3 of our Active Play sessions and again we were lucky with the weather.

In Maths we were focussing on the seasons and the months of the year as well as continuing to practise our place value through games.

Finally we continued on with our learning in our Creative play area.

Last week was week 2 of our active play and again we had lots of fun keeping active outdoors, enjoying the lovely weather that we had.

We also began a new block in our creative play area.  Our focus just now is European countries.  Some of the activities we worked on as part of this was to use the Lego to try and recreate some famous landmarks, made a Picasso inspired face and used an atlas to identify some of the main countries in Europe.

Finally in art we created some aquatic inspired mosaic pictures.

We had a great start to this week enjoying time outdoors taking part in the Active Play program.  This involved working together as a team, lots of running around and importantly having fun.

After all our exercise we continued on with our discursive writing.  Mrs Potter was very impressed with the great planning discussions we had together before we began.

In Maths we began looking at part part whole models which will help us with our understanding of addition and subtraction.

Finally we continued our Fairtrade learning in our Play area where some children decided to create their own Fairtrade shop to sell their products.

We now have our play area set up with our focus for the next few weeks being Fairtrade. We were learning how beans grow and using our data handling skills to show how far different products travel to reach us.

There was lots of fantastic learning going on and we have more great artwork for the walls.

Another popular activity were the Bee-bots which we had to program to visit the different shops.

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We finished the week learning about the lifecycle of a sea turtle.