8th Nov '24
Welcome back to a new term. We hope that you all had a lovely holiday. The children have had a busy first week back. This week the children have listened to the story "The Paper Bag Princess" by Robert Munsch. We read the story and then looked at the key features of an instruction text, "How to tame a dragon". We will be thinking about the features over the next few weeks when the children learn how to write their own set of instructions.
In maths this week the children have been thinking about subtraction linking it with part whole models and counting back along a number line. The children learnt that you take a smaller part away from a bigger part to see what is left. We also did some basic problem solving using a number line. Again the children had to think about the whole amount that they had to start with. They have tried very hard writing their own number sentences.
This term in design and technology the children will be designing and making a healthy wrap or stuffed pitta bread. On Tuesday the children tried wraps and pitta bread to see which they would prefer.
They then evaluated the wrap and pitta bread after they had tried it to see which one they liked the most and which one they would like to eat again! Why not ask your child which one they preferred?
What a treat we had in Forest school this week when our food them continued!! Despite the rather gloomy weather it certainly didn't dampen our spirits as we were told that this we were learning how to not only safely make a fire but also how to safely cook on a fire!! WOW, could this day get any better we asked ourselves??
As listened intently and followed the instructions to ensure that we kept ourselves safe and soon enough we had made our very own fires!
It was then time for us to start cooking on our fires and the air was soon filled with the smell of apples coated with seasonal smell of cinnamon...I have a say a personal favourite of mine! It was delicious!
As we got to the end of the week something new happened this Friday (well kind of old as well and I've taught you all before!).......Mrs Brown was back!!
I couldn't be happier to be back teaching all of Kingfishers and we had the most fantastic first Friday back together! As the day began there was excitement in the air and we were ready for our fun-filled but I must say busy Friday. In Maths we were straight into it exploring 3D shapes and worked really hard on developing our knowledge of the language associated with 3D shapes:
edges- The lines where 2 faces meet
vertex- Where 2 sides of a shape meet
face- An individual flat surface on an object
Why not have a go at finding some 3D shapes at home and counting these features?
After lunch we also practiced our number bonds today using our tens frames, verbalizing our number bonds and then looking at how these connect to number bonds to 20.
In the afternoon we started our new Geography topic 'Our local area' and began by discussing firstly where we might see and find maps and then why we use maps. The children came up with lots of fantastic ideas of where we might see or use maps:
- At a theme park!
- If we going somewhere for the first time
- A pirate looking treasure
- A train map
- A map of the world
We then explored a map of London and discussed different features of the map, Kingfishers were fantastic at noticing them! From the River Thames to the stations, landmarks to the parks that were shown by areas of green! After we had talked about different types of maps we then discussed how today we were going to create a map of our very own classroom and would need to create a birds ey view of the classroom....yes we were going to need to pretend to look from up above!!
I was so impressed with how the children took their time to map out where the features of the classroom were, from the tables and drawers to the board and the rug, they carefully thought were each feature needed to be and even labelled them, what great map work!
Wow, what a week it has been! From cinnamon frosted apples to making our very own maps of the classroom, we have certainly had a busy first week back!
It has been an absolute pleasure to be back in Kingfishers this week and I look forward to teaching them every Friday this term!
From all of the staff in Kingfishers have a lovely weekend and we look forward to seeing you all next week.
