25 - 31 October (week 43) Halloweeeeeen

 We seemed to pack a lot into this week! 

We practiced some more capital letter writing. Then changed our writing practice up a bit with some activities based on the book "Frog and Toad are friends" by Arnold Lobel. On one day we read the first chapter, talked about how a piece of writing has an author and a title. Then we wrote our own short stories (we chose the theme of food!).

 On another day we read the next chapter, answered some questions about it and then wrote down the title, author and main characters from 3 books we had at home, trying to use our nicest joined up writing of course. 

We built a little lego skull from a Lego Explorer magazine and read some of the information and activities. There were some optical illusions and quizzes. 

We also started the Lego "Build to Launch" activities - we watched the mission briefing and did the first mini mission - giving each other clear detailed step by step instructions as if we were programming a robot. We had a go at instructions for making our morning snack.

We did a couple of the Hey Duggee and Joe Wicks workout badge videos on a couple of days. 

We read the next lesson in the School of Music book and read about what pop music is and how it has changed over time. We listened to some of Vin's favourite pop songs from more modern ones and from older bands to compare. We noticed how there were different types of instruments and more electronic music in the newer ones. 

We did the first experiments from Vin's new Letterbox Lab subscription. This box theme is all about colour and how investigating can show things that are previously hidden. We have previously done some experiments with chromatography so we were a bit familiar with the experiment to split apart the colours in a felt pen but we also did the experiment using skittles sweets and it was really cool to see the different colours that make up each colour coating! We also talked about how the printer has 3 different colour cartridges inside - Cyan, Magenta and Yellow and how it uses those 3 colours in varying amounts to make all the other colours that it prints. We also drew some fun patterns on the chromatography paper and dripped water on them to make the colours spread.

We played the Star Wars Unlock game which involved solving lots of puzzles and clues and adding lots of 2 digit numbers together!

We made Möbius strips and then drew a line all the way along to show how it was a continuous line. Then we cut along the line and the möbius strip got bigger!

We looked at some artwork by M C Escher, including his Möbius strip with ants walking along it. We talked about optical illusions and perspective.

We made our Animals of the World jigsaw puzzle and read out some of the facts from the book as we spotted animals in the jigsaw as we built it.

We made dracula dentures! We stuck mini marshmallows with nutella to some green apple lips.

We did some of the challenges with the Laser Maze.

Vinnie painted the Day of the Dead mask from his Aztec Mysteries in Time box. Once it had dried he decorated it with the jewel stickers too.

We did the next Mystery Science lesson in our current topic - What if there were no electricity? We talked about all the different uses there are for electricity and how much our lives would change if we didn't have it. Then we made our own mini flashlights with LEDs, foil and a battery. 

We talked about what things change as you get older, some things that we were scared of when we were younger but now aren't so scary , talked about ways you could reassure someone else who was experiencing a big change in their life and also about what things you can look forward to that might be an exciting change such as when we moved house. What things stayed the same and were reassuring. 

We practiced some maths tricks to help remember times tables. 

We watched a short video about the artist Yayoi Kusama, how she loved to put polkadots on her art and how she often drew or made pumpkins. We looked at some of her installations where she used mirrors to create an infinite effect. Then we made our own polkadot pumpkin pictures for halloween.

We played with some new blocks we bought that have fractions, decimals and percentages on and show the equivalent sizes. Vin made a quiz for me to find equivalent blocks for different fractions. And also just had fun making tall towers and shapes with them!

We made toffee apples, Vin measured out the sugar and was very careful around the hot toffee!

We went for a couple of local walks to check out some of the halloween decorations people had put up. 

Phew, what a busy week!