17 - 23 october 2022 (week 42)

 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 out for another activity. I thought he’d be too old for them but he still had a lot of fun tipping all the shapes off and then fitting them again.

At communigrow the children mixed up pumpkin pancake batter and cooked pancakes on little stoves.

We chose an oak tree to examine. We estimated its age and height, looked at the changing colours of the leaves and at its buds and talked about why the tree is making buds for spring now. We looked at a right angle triangle with equal angles to see how to estimate height of tree by looking at it at a 45 degree angle. Our tree was approximately 70 years old and 15 metres tall. We saw lots of different types of fungi growing on it too.

We looked at various pictures and photos of winter trees and silhouettes including some realistic and abstract ones by Piet Mondrian. Then we drew our own wintery tree pictures. Or in Vinnie’s case, terrifying halloween tree.

Vin had a lot of fun making a spooky Halloween scene on scratch. Then he used some of the new things he had learned to make a funny disco scene.

We watched a video about people that lived in castles. Then vinnie cut pictures of them out and labelled them. Then we made our own little castle people, vinnie made a king and I made an entertainer. Vinnie then also made a scary monster peg person too!

We used the Spanish words book dictionary sections to identify and link some animal pictures with their Spanish names.

We watched some mini mysteries on mystery science, vinnie chose can animals be friends with different species and why do snakes shed their skin.