Vin's Learning Journey

 This theme for this week’s article of the day is Ancient Inventions. We read about fireworks, ice skating, and soap and looked for nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. We talked about why adverbs might appear less frequently in a factual article than a fictional story. We read 10 facts about the festival of Diwali. We learned how to say we like or dislike things in Spanish and practiced saying and writing some likes and dislikes. We chose a couple of cosmic kids yoga videos to do. Vin helped make a tuna pasta bake. Vin wondered why we see spots in our eyes after looking at a bright light. We found a fun video explaining. Some of Vin’s friends that are a little older recently did their 11+ tests. We had a look at some sample tests to see what kind of quiz questions they had in them and had a go at them. We did this on a couple of days to look at the different kinds of questions (maths, English, patterns etc). We had fun acting out the Winnie the Witch book with the contents of the...

 This weeks “Article a day” was all about the different continents. We read about the Andes and the Amazon in South America and had a little side track to look at polylepis trees and howler monkeys. Vinnie told me about the Atacama desert in Chile and we went on google maps street view to have a look at it. Each day we also spotted a noun, a verb, and an adjective in each article and spotted and named different punctuation. We weighed some items from around the house using the scales. First we weighed a can of soup, then before we weighed each item we estimated its weight and whether we thought it would be heavier or lighter than the can. It was quite tricky to guess for some of the items! We read the books about castles that we had borrowed from the library. We chatted about some of the different things we knew and thought about castles we had seen in real life and how people might have lived in them all those centuries ago. Vin spotted the shapes and fractions in a box I had got ...

This week we read a short article each day about how different parts of our bodies work - the nervous system, the muscular system, the brain, and eyes and vision. We watched a video about different masks around the world and their inspiration such as traditional stories or animals and a few artists that have made masks out of different materials and in different styles. Then we used a variety of materials to make our own masks. We learned the days of the week in Spanish and practiced putting them in order. Vin stuck them onto a sheet and drew a little picture of what activities he might do each day. We solved some puzzles in the maths puzzle pad. At communigrow the children separated out the seeds from the flower heads to store ready for planting next year. They raked grass out of the wildflower area and moved it to the compost heap. We watched a video about how castles are made then chose what features to include when we designed our own castles. Then we built them. We learned how to ...