We have been working on length with Mrs Rand. We had fun in problem solving this week when we had to try create robot monsters using different heads, bodies and legs to work out how to make the tallest and shortest robots. Then we had to see how many different combinations we could make out of the various pieces.

As we are looking at our caterpillars everyday, we remembered Eric Carle’s story ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ We had all heard it before but we enjoyed hearing it again. We watched a video where Eric Carle explained how he used collage to create the pictures in the story. We used paint to create shades of green then carefully cut caterpillar shaped sections and stuck them onto the paper. We think our caterpillars look as good as Eric Carle’s caterpillars!

We were very excited to welcome some new members of p3 this week. As part of our work on life cycles, we received some caterpillars that we will watch change into butterflies over the next few weeks. Each day, we choose a caterpillar monitor to check how the caterpillars have changed & record it on our chart

We explored some statements about ice and water on a Concept Cartoon. In our group we wrote our thoughts on post it notes. Then we talked it through.

We decided that the water had not leaked out of the glass because there were no cracks or holes.

We also thought that another false statement was the one about the ice melting outside the glass. It could not do this because the ice and water were inside the glass.

So, the true statement was the water vapour in the air has turned into drops of water on the outside of the glass.

We went outside to explore and investigate this for real with containers full of ice and water.

We explored looking for patterns in numbers in Problem Solving.

The elf problem we managed to work out by drawing a picture to represent elves, shoes and hats first. Then we worked out the answer by counting the elves without hats and shoes.

To work out the number of buttons in our class it was difficult for us to estimate or guess because there were so many combinations. So, in the end we took everybody individually, wrote down how many buttons were on their clothes and then we rounded numbers to the nearest 10 to estimate.

We checked to see if we were close by using a calculator to count up the many numbers.

Claude Monet was a famous artist who painted many water colours of water lilies at Giverny in France.

We experimented with a wash of colour, dabbing paint like the Impressionists did and even using a mixture of watercolour paints and coloured pencils.

Many of us found the Impressionist style of painting very calming and therapeutic.

We enjoyed exploring how water is important in our Art work and by adding a little or a lot of water we can create quite different effects with our paints.

We think we have done well in these things this week:

Procedural writing about how to make toast.

Some  of us think the content of our procedures and our presentation  have improved.

A lot of us were surprised by how good we were at rounding to the nearest 10.

We enjoyed working with larger numbers – carrying and exchanging

We enjoyed Talking and Listening sessions this week but, were surprised at how challenging the talking to an audience was.

This morning we watched how to make toast. Then we wrote a procedure about it.

We had to have a title, purpose, goal, materials and numbered steps to explain how to make toast.

This was a modelled piece of writing so, we discussed it with our teacher then she modelled how we should set it out.

Next week we will try to write a procedure independently.

We have been learning about rounding numbers to the nearest ten this week.

We know that the last number must be a zero if we are rounding to the nearest 10.

The trick one was 480 as it stays the same.

We sorted pictures into sets. This is called classifying. We had to work co-operatively with each other and be respectful to the group leader.

We worked out how to represent the pictures with cubes and turned the data into a graph.

At first it was tricky working in a group but, then we learned to turn take, compromise and listen to others.