Vin's Learning Journey

 This is our last week of the year before we take 3 weeks off for Christmas and New Year. Our week started with something a bit unusual - snow! We went sledging, built a snow gorilla, had snowball fights and of course, as per our theme, built snow castles! Our theme for article of the week this week is all about the lead up to the Age of Exploration. We read about the travels of Marco Polo, the methods used for navigation, the spice trade, and the new ships the Europeans started making in the Middle Ages to help them travel longer distances. We had some more fun with numbers. We practiced more adding and subtracting within 20 and tried out some different methods of making it easier when subtracting such as breaking the number down so you can get to an easier number first then subtract the rest. We played sum bingo, a sum matching memory game, a number bonds to 20 matching memory game, and a game where we had to find the missing number to add to make a total and do that many of an a...

 Our theme for article of the day is landmarks of Latin America. Our first stop was to look up where Latin America is! We read about the Atacama Desert, and about Machu Picchu, the Uyuni salt flat of Bolivia, and the Andes mountains. We practiced some more adding and subtracting within 20 and played catch with a beanbag while trying to guess a number and giving clues of higher or lower. If we dropped the beanbag we had to subtract the number of throws already done from the total to see how many throws we had left. We threw 20 blocks at a target and wrote fact families for the number in or out totalling 20. We rolled two twenty sided dice and found the difference between the numbers, wrote a number sentence for each one and did that many star jumps! We did more activities from the White Rose maths resources. We made some Christmas cards and Christmas magnets to send to people. We read another Spanish story. This one was about hobbies, we looked up some words, answered the quiz and s...

 Our theme for article of the day this week is Climate Change and the Oceans. We read about climate change and how scientists have done experiments and studies of the world over time and how they can detect the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from thousands of years ago by taking ice cores from Antarctic ice. We looked at photos of Glacier national park. We read about acidification of the ocean and also talked a bit about fossil fuels and renewable sources of energy. Our fun with maths continues with some new games, we put some 3d shapes in a bag and took turns to feel one and describe it to the other person to see if they can guess which shape it is. We found describing the number of faces and what flat shapes made them helped the most. We sorted a big box of shapes and named then then thought about which ones would work for a tower , which shapes would only work well in one orientation and then built a tower. We made patterns with the shape tiles and tried to see how many lines o...