Vin's Learning Journey

Our theme for article of the day this week is ‘physical science’. We read about electromagnetic radiation and how scientists are still not sure why visible light is the fastest moving thing we know about, another article was about lasers, and we read about Einstein’s famous equation E=mc². We played more number games: rolling a die each and running up and down the hallway that number of times, then comparing who rolled the greatest or least number and writing a number sentence to find the difference; drawing 3 cards between 4 and 10 from the deck and taking each card’s number away from 20 blocks, then writing each number sentence; we rolled a 10 sided dice then doubled that number and tried to throw that many cubes into a bowl. Then we added up the ones in the bowl and the ones out of the bowl to write a number sentence. We've also been doing activities from the powerpoint resources on white rose maths website for the last few weeks and using blocks and number cards to try the diff...

 Our article of the day theme for this week is food and farming. We read about the diverse foods eaten in India depending on where certain crops grew best, we looked at some Iranian recipes, and read about the history of bread and how it’s mass produced. We played more number games including putting animals into ‘aquariums’ with giant tweezers to make the fact families for adding to 10, throwing and catching the ball based on which playing cards we drew, and hiding different numbers of blocks for the other person to find and add together. We had a go at some Spanish vocabulary on the Duolingo website. We learned about the concept of “form” in art. We played with some dough making spheres and cubes, then Vin shaped the first letter of his name and decorated it. Then he made a “pinch pot” and decorated that. We did some more story idea brainstorming and worked together to come up with the start of a story, then Vinnie spent 20 minutes writing it down. On another day he spent an hour ...

We played some fun games with numbers this week. We practiced different games involving throwing and catching, hopping around etc then writing down number sentences for different number bonds up to 10. With all the other new maths things we’ve been learning recently, some of the more basic things seem to have been forgotten so we’re going to get the basic number facts strongly re-secured. We also watched the number blocks episode “Blast Off!”. Our article of the week theme is about biomimicry this week. We read about things that have been invented after inspiration from the animal kingdom such as materials that use technology similar to the denticles on sharkskin to move through the water more efficiently, how the bullet train in Japan was inspired by kingfishers and owls, and how NASA is inspired by gecko feet to make robots that can grip to the outside of the international space station. We brainstormed ideas for things Vinnie could write about. Then he spent 15 minutes writing about...

 Our theme for article of the week this week is animals of the ocean. We read about how scientists track sharks, scientists investigating the aftermath of an underwater volcanic eruption, and the different zones or layers of the ocean. We found out some information about the Mexican celebration of Dia de los muertos. We read some facts on the National Geographic website. We did some Into Film activities about the movie Coco. The day before we watched the film we watched the trailer and talked a bit about the plot of the film. Then on dia de los muertos we watched the film itself. Afterwards we talked about what we liked and disliked, the significance of one of the songs and other aspects about it. We drew a picture about someone who is important in our lives and the things they like.   We did a halloween party themed maths mystery which involved practicing adding and subtracting 4 digit numbers, times tables, tally marks, rounding numbers, Roman numerals, and number bonds to 1...