2021 Week 3 16 - 24 January

 This week we continued our 1 minute writing each day, carrying on with paying attention to making the letters a bit smaller and neater. 

For maths, we played some more with the place value arrow cards on a couple of days. We practiced adding and subtracting with them, working on one number place at a time, and practiced writing in squares in a maths book.

 We did some column adding puzzles from his Sherlock Bones activity book. We took it in turns writing them down but Vin wrote very neatly in the squares.

We read a story book called "Fractions in disguise". It was a mystery story but throughout the story we learned about fractions and how they can be reduced to simpler forms. After we had read it we played with marbles to make our own fractions. Vin really liked the story and made up his own version with a valuable 12/25 that got stolen!

We used our cute little sea creatures to have a refresher of adding and subtracting within 20, as a simpler practice of when more than one number place is affected by a sum.

We took out a trial of the Mathseeds website. We tried to use it last week but it didn't load for some reason. We tried it again this week and played it on a couple of days. Vin did a lesson about how "near doubles" can help you when adding. Then another day he did some more doubles practice as well as lessons about money, coin recognition and change when shopping. He had a bit of time exploring all the different modes and games that were on the website and had fun playing lots of maths games.

Vin invented his own game based on the Near Doubles lesson. He got his super mario dominoes, then gave each character a number. We had to choose a domino and then add the 2 characters together. He chose to listen to orchestrated versions of video game music while we played to keep the theme!

On Monday we went for a nice walk to the park to visit the Kingfisher that is there for the winter. We have never managed to spot him in previous visits but heard from other people that he was getting a bit less shy. Sure enough, as soon as we got to his favourite spot we saw him!

We watched him for quite a long time before continuing our walk. We saw lots of other lovely birds too like robins, magpies, a pair of blackbirds and some sparrows but the kingfisher was definitely the highlight.

We went back to the "Animals and habitats through time" unit on Mystery science that we had started one of the fossil activities last year. We did the "anchor" activity first, a question that links all the other lessons together. It was about a watery cave and some odd things that had been found in there. We wrote down our thoughts and questions that we hope to be able to answer as we learned more throughout the next lessons. We reminded ourselves of the fossil activity we previously did and if it could answer any of our questions. We also did the "how do we know what dinosaurs looked like?" activity on another day. We looked at more fossils, inspected and compared the skulls of dinosaurs and modern day lizards and mammals. We looked at their teeth and how that could tell us more about what they would have eaten. We saw their skulls resembled lizards, they laid eggs, and they had even found fossilised skin with scales.

We did an activity to help with practicing following directions. Vin did some great listening to accurately decorate his wintery picture.

We did a couple more yoga quest videos. Frank the frog showed us how important it is to cheer our friends on and to help them when they need us. Pedro the penguin was all about perseverance! Even a penguin can fly if they keep trying and take the time to figure it out!

We read a couple more pages in the "Mistakes in History" book. We looked at Ancient Rome and started the Mayan page but will finish that another time.

We did the next section of the Nutcracker Art History for kids activities. We heard a bit more of the story then we learned a bit about Salvador Dali and surrealism. We looked at his famous painting "The persistence of memory". Then we thought about what dreamy magical things could happen to the clock in the story of the nutcracker when it strikes 12 and the nutcracker comes to life? We drew our own surreal clocks.

We did some medieval activities again inspired by Vin's lego explorer magazine. We took a tour of the hampton court palace kitchens and saw how some people recreate the old recipes and methods in the kitchens there. We listened to a story from the tales of King Arthur's knights, then we designed our own Coat of Arms on a shield (a favourite activity of Vin's we seem to have done quite a few times now!)

Next week is Vin's free choice week. We do that on Wednesdays too. This Wednesday there was a lot of Lego building! I wonder what he will choose to do next week...