7 - 13 November 2022 (week 45)

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 something of his choice. He did this on 2 days and did some great writing.

We read the book from the invisible nature reading sparks kit from the library. It was about things that some animals could sense in ways that humans cannot such as UV, infrared, electromagnetism. Then we tried taste testing a few drops of squash in 100ml of water and seeing if we could tell the difference between that and plain water. It was pretty tricky and makes it more amazing how sharks can sense things a mile away in water. Then we made a magnetic fishing game, vinnie drew some cute fish and we cut them out. Then he tied the string to the magnet to make the fishing line and we timed how long it took us to catch all the fish.

We played the brain box ancient Egypt board game from the Nile story sack.

We joined in with a cosmic kids yoga adventure.

We had a go at making some paint stamps. We tried cutting out shapes in cardboard to stamp and glueing pieces of string to cardboard to stamp with. We looked at some silk screen printed pictures and linocut pictures too.

We read about how different architecture has different acoustics and tried out the acoustics in different rooms of our house.

We watched a video and read about the kinds of foods that would have been eaten by rich people in castles in the Middle Ages and what the poorer people would have had. We made some vegetable and bacon pastries and talked about the differences between the utensils, food, and oven we have and what would have been used hundreds of years ago.  

Vin chose a page to practice in his handwriting book.

Vin made the last project in the Scratch for beginner’s book. He made an elephant eating tacos that had a variable for the number eaten and changed the background when they were all gone. We’ve learned a lot from the book and Vin would like to find another book of beginner’s projects to do.

We read about Antarctica, made an imaginary packing list for an expedition, looked at giant antarctic octopuses, leopard seals, whales, and learned about why emperor penguins huddle together.

We joined in with a PE with Joe video.