Term 3 Lunar New Year
Before we begin, we would like to say a big thank
you to Tesco-Hungerford who kindly donated some seeds to us this week - we will be planting them soon and look forward to sampling the produce - watch this space!
With another storm blowing us into the week, we were starting to wonder whether the rain would ever stop! As we explored the weather outlook for days ahead we could hardly believe our eyes, rain, sun, sleet and yes yet again two more weather warnings, it was going to be a blustery start to the week!
With all that blustery weather outside and talk of rain and sunshine what could more suitable to do but settle into the day with a rainbow breathing mindfulness excercise.
As we dipped our hands into our coloured 'paint pots', taking a breath in and raising our arms up to form our rainbow, we felt a sense of calm come over us, we then breathed out through our mouths as we lowered our arms back down. As we repeated this through each of the colours of the rainbow, we forgot all about the busy mornings we had already had and just came back to our calm space inside Robins, ready to take on the rest of our day.
This week in Talk for Writing we really showcased our writing skills and began writing parts of the story ourselves to show what the zoo had sent us! Each group took on the part of being a different animal in the story, saying the sentence, counting words in it and then writing the sentence on a whiteboard before writing it on their paper. Robins have also been trying hard to use our tricky word sheets to help them!
Was the animal too tall or too naughty?
Or was he too fierce or too grumpy?
Robins are working really hard to think about their letter formation and their sounds during their writing, just look at the progress they are making! Remember to keep practising at home!
In Maths this week we have been focusing on our counting skills and recognising 'how many' objects there are. We enjoyed singing counting rhymes, including '1,2,3,4,5 once I caught a fish alive....' which is one of our favourites and then went onto collect different amounts of objects, naming how many we had collected and matching these to the correct number!
On Tuesday Mrs Brown needed some help with her counting when she kept getting the total number wrong! We helped her remember that the last number in the count tells us 'how many' there are altogether, well done Robins!
In RE Robins delved into the history of Chinese New Year and were transported into the magical world of the Chinese Zodiac, listening to the story 'The Great Race', the children were fascinated by how each year is named after a different animal but were not so happy with the method that the Rat had chosen to make sure he won the race - in fact the children were quite disappointed with the Rat's cheating ways!
We learnt how this year is the year of the Snake and watched a video which Robins loved....
"I'm going to tell my Mum about this video!"
"That was so good!"
We learnt that red is the lucky colour in China and 6 is their lucky number but number 4 is unlucky!
After we had learnt all about Chinese New Year Robins made their very own snakes, just look how fantastic they are!
Our Tuesday wouldn't be complete without our PE lesson and this week we dived under the sea and went on a swimming adventure to the depths of the ocean! As we swam deeper, circulating our arms as we moved around the hall, we suddenly turned into seahorses, galloping around the ocean before spotting seaweed and swaying in the waves!
We then faced our biggest challenge of the day, it was time to be a crab and we needed all of our arm, leg and tummy muscles to help lift us up! Soon we were moving like crabs across the floor!
It was tiring being a crab but we kept going and we were soon off, trying to get to our coloured homes under the sea!
To finish our under the sea adventure we play Jellyfish (Blue cones) and Turtles (Yellow cones), if you were a Jellyfish your cone was upside down and if you were a Turtle your cone was placed in the normal position. The aim of the game was to get as many cones turned into either Jellyfish or Turtles as you could before the time was up!
In the end both the Jellyfish and Turtles won a game each- what a way to end the day!
On Wednesday, we were back to our colour mixing - this week it was yellow and blue! The children had rememered most (I am being generous when I use the word most!!!!) of the instructions on how to colour mix and we had some interesting shades ( more like block colour) of green! I think we will repeat this activity again next week with a more step by step approach.
And finally we ended our week with our Lunar New Year celebrations. In the morning, we looked at some of the items that the children had brought in for us to talk about, we also had some fascinating photos of the Great Wall of China and photos of China itself (thank you to Everly's Mum for all the photos, what an amazing experience you must have had when you visited China, your photos certainly brought our learning to life). In the afternoon, we came back into the classroom and our eyes nearly popped out of our heads - yes there was a feast, a banquet all ready for us! The pictures don't do the occasion justice - every child thoroughly enjoy the celebration, they shared, they laughed, they encouraged each other to try new foods and demonstrated how to use chopsticks, they certainly brought out the best in each other - what a special afternoon shared with very special people.