12 - 18 December 2022 (week 50)

 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 action depending on what was rolled eg 7+?=19 , have to do 12 star jumps, then we wrote the number sentences and the inverse sentence too.

We had a go at another Scratch project. Vinnie programmed a boat to sail along a river without crashing into the banks.

We read an interesting book together about castles and fortresses around the world.

We read another rockalingua story in Spanish, it was all about moving and having a brain break. We joined in with the actions, answered the quiz and solved the matching puzzle. Then had a dance to the song trying to remember all the actions.

We read about South America with Banjo cat, looked at a video of the Amazon rainforest and listened to some traditional Bolivian music. 

We checked on our cress and learned a bit more about photosynthesis! Our cress kept in the dark had grown tall using the energy stored in the seed to strive for light. It had not made any chlorophyll though as that would use up nutrients and energy. Our cress from the light had grown more slowly but looked stronger and had dark green leaves. We left the cress from the dark out in the light and it has started making chlorophyll too now!

Vinnie wrote a lovely story about a snowball fight with some clever illustrations of snowballs splatting across some of the words.

We made some Christmas ornaments by sticking stuff in PVA glue which we will leave to dry hard and then hang up.

We made Colombian arepa in the style of Julieta from encanto .

Merry Christmas!