Amelia’s class Week 3 Term 1

Hello all,

Our weekly routines are well underway, and the children have started to become more independent with day-to-day transitions. We are learning to pack up after ourselves, such as taking lunch boxes outside once inside time is called, packing our bags after packaway time, and returning resources once we have finished using them.

Our literacy stations went very smoothly this week, and we learned about our first phoneme of the term, the sound /b/ shown with b or bb. The children seem to really enjoy our rotation time and are working very quietly and focused for a quiet classroom to support each other’s learning.

We finished up our maths unit on data by challenging ourselves to throw as many beanbags as we can into a hoop in under 2 minutes. The children partnered up and tallied the number of throws their partner got inside the hoop. They absolutely loved this activity, and we finished it off by analyzing our data that we had represented in a graph on the whiteboard. We looked at how tally marks are a great method of recording data rapidly and can be easily understood and compared when displayed all together.

During PIPs, our juniors started our new unit of work on ‘Oceans’. We voted on a name for the group, ‘The Dolphins’! In our first lesson, we looked at the oceans around the world by exploring a globe and Google Earth. The children pointed out how large our bodies of water are and how much of the Earth is taken up by water compared with landmass. We spoke about salinity in ocean water and did a fun experiment trying to make an egg float in water by using diluted salt. The children that were brave enough decided to give this salty water a little taste. Yuck!

We finished off our week with a lesson on ‘Rad Reptiles’. This week, we looked at a subclass of reptiles known as ‘Testudines’, which includes turtles and tortoises. We first read the story ‘The Foolish Tortoise’ by Eric Carle and discussed the purpose of a tortoise’s shell. We watched a video comparing tortoises and turtles and created our own turtle craft using paper plates and crepe paper. They look beautiful hanging up on the wall, so make sure to pop your head in and have a look!

Amelia x