20 - 26 September 2021 (week 38)

 This week we have continued to practice joined up writing and to update our calendar each day. There was an interesting change this week at last as the season changed to Astronomical Autumn!

We read about the harvest moon and the autumnal equinox. We read a couple of poems and closed our eyes to imagine the scene as we listened to them. We talked about what things remind us of Autumn. 

We started a new mystery science unit about energy and electricity. We watched the music video of the song This Too Shall Pass by OK Go - it's a giant Rube Goldberg machine. We observed the different things moving and the chain reactions. We filled in our "Conceptual model" sheets and the "See Think Wonder" chart. We also watched some other Chain reaction videos that Vinnie likes (The Sprice machines ones on youtube).

 

Vin did more food prep again this week, helping to prepare snacks and lunch independently.

We did some activities from Twinkl about having a positive learning attitude. We filled in a sheet about activities we enjoyed or found difficult, did a block challenge, talked about how it felt to be faced by a difficult challenge, how you could approach it with a positive attitude and how it felt to succeed at something.

We looked at a picture of Galileo's drawings of the moon. He was the first person to study the moon through a telescope. Vinnie told me that he had read that Galileo was arrested for his theory that the Earth orbited the sun as it was believed at the time that the Universe revolved around the Earth.

We went out for a walk after dark to watch the Harvest moon rise (well it was the day after in the end as it was too cloudy on the actual day!). It was beautiful. We took the binoculars and tried to spot craters from our map of the moon. We saw Jupiter too.

We wrote a haiku together. We thought of some words and phrases to describe the harvest moon or autumn in general. We took it in turns to say them and the other person had to clap out the syllables. We wrote some of them down and then worked out how we could arrange them into a haiku with 3 lines, 5 syllables, 7 syllables then 5 again.

We read "The Old Pond" by Bashō and talked about how a haiku can capture a moment in nature. Then Vin wrote out our haiku in his nicest handwriting into our nature journal.

We went for a couple of walks this week to try and spot the first signs of autumn. We made a scavenger hunt to spot spider webs, red leaves and other Autumn-y things.

We worked on our patchwork embroidery squares. They will be part of a bigger artwork that is being made.

We baked nutella twists. We used ready made puff pastry so it was pretty easy!

 While they baked we did an activity from our "School of Music" book. We looked at their page of lots of musical genres and picked a few to listen to. Some of the choices were : Barbershop, Gagaku (a type of japanese classical music), Calypso, Goth metal, Techno, Jazz, Chip tune, and Heavy Metal. Vinnie liked the metal music best! We noticed how the different genres often used different types of instruments and had a variety of tempos and styles.

Books from the library are still the same - will visit again next week!