Vin's Learning Journey

Trains are one of Vinnie's favourite things, so it was an easy choice for a theme! We all visited the Eastbourne Miniature Steam Railway on the bank holiday Monday. Vinnie loves it here so much. We rode the train loads of time, played in the playgrounds and admired the model railway layouts. The next day, Vinnie wanted to make his own version of the EMSR. He used the map from the leaflet and copied the layout using his wooden train track. Throughout the week, Vinnie built all the bits of his lego train set too and made a few different track layouts, including this one outside. Volunteering day was a bird and bee survey. Perfect excuse to go and coo over the ducklings and baby moorhens as well as admiring the bees and butterflies. At art group, Vinnie drew a wonderful picture of the station and the train "Rachel" from the Eastbourne Miniature Railway. He took such care over getting all the details just right! We visited Pepenbury woodland with some friends...

We decided to have a mini theme week (well about 3 days!) all about the Very Hungry Caterpillar! We've started seeing butterflies while we've been out and about so it seemed like a fun idea. You can't have a very hungry caterpillar theme without some very hungry caterpillars though! So we made some. We read the story of the Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle to give us some ideas of what our little caterpillars may enjoy eating. We drew pictures of the food and cut them out. We used a hole punch to munch through all the different foods. Those caterpillars had a great banquet! We made a bar chart of how many of each type of food the caterpillar in the book ate. Vinnie had to remember the names of the fruit from the book and write them down, then we looked in the book at how many the caterpillar had eaten. After that, Vinnie had to choose the correct sized stick to make a bar on the graph. Volunteering that week wasn't to do with caterpillars, but it was ...

This week we have continued with the handwriting practice sheets and working through the lift the flap Maths puzzles books. Vinnie has done so well giving a really good effort at his writing and really concentrating on getting nice clear shapes. He feels so proud of himself. Inspired by one of the puzzles in the maths books, Vinnie chose a few items to weigh. We talked about different units of measurement and weight and Vinnie wrote down the weights of his items. We made the other types of seeds from the Mystery science lesson about how seeds spread. They flew so well! Vin's favourite was the "spinner" seed. We learned a little from the maths book (again!) about how some 3D shapes can be made from 2D shapes called "nets". We had a go at making our own net for a cube. We learned that spheres and donuts cannot be made from a single net. We made the most of some sunnier days (in between the cold rain) by going to several parks, with friends and alone. ...