2021 14 - 20 March Last week of Winter!

 Each day this week Vin did his 2.5 minutes writing. We had a look at some nice joined up handwriting by children his age (for "inspiration"). Vin declares his writing is even better. Good to have confidence! (Slightly misguided perhaps...). He is doing really well practicing every day and it definitely seems to be helping having the words to trace.

This Saturday is the Spring Equinox. We read about what that means and looked at how the Earth orbits the Sun at an angle and how that changes which hemisphere is facing the Sun each season. We read some Spring poems and looked at a painting by Monet called "An Orchard in Spring". We talked about how it looks like the painting was done a bit later in Spring than at the start as the leaves are out and Vinnie thinks there may be bluebells which come out a bit later in the year.

We finished reading the story book from this month's mystery in time. It is about Wartime Britain. We were inspired to write our own secret messages but we didn't have lemon juice, only lime juice. We thought it may still work as they are both citrus fruits but we just couldn't get our lime juice messages to appear with heat! We left them in the sun, on a lamp, and tried the hair dryer but they didn't work. We had fun hiding the messages and doing secret spy missions to find them. Vin had fun cutting and squeezing the lime too.

On a couple of other days we read the fact magazine about Wartime Britain too and we chatted about some of the things in there and did the quiz. 

Vin drew his own "Squid Bits" comic inspired by Jess Bradley's comic in Phoenix magazine. He emailed it to the Phoenix so is keeping his fingers crossed that they will print it in a future comic. He also drew a picture with Bunny vs Monkey.

Vin played on his Prodigy maths game every day this week. On Tuesday he had a bit of a maths themed day as he asked to watch Numberblocks as they have a new series. We also watched and played games on BBC bitesize website about fractions and the 2, 5 and 10 times tables. We watched some other videos too on Go Noodle and BBC Super movers about patterns, rounding numbers up or down, changes and homophones.

We watched a video demonstrating how the moon orbits the Earth and how that affects how much of the lit up side of the moon we can see. Vin cut out pictures of the phases of the moon and worked out where on the sheet they should go.

We found a nice birds activity for this week. There were specific instructions that I read out and Vin had to follow them to identify the birds in the picture, colour them in and read some facts about them

We walked to the library and spotted how some of the buds had got bigger since we last walked along there, we saw some starting to open and tried to guess if they would be leaves or flowers. On the way home we saw the moon was already out. Vin drew it in his nature journal. We will try and spot it again in a few days and draw it again to figure out if it is waxing or waning. Based on our chart we made, we think it is a Waxing Crescent.

Vin has mostly been reading his Bunny Vs Monkey books this week (a lot of his other books are packed to move house). Next week is free choice week so I'm sure there will be a lot more stories read then.