28 November - 4 December 2022 (week 48)

 Our theme for article of the day this week is Climate Change and the Oceans. We read about climate change and how scientists have done experiments and studies of the world over time and how they can detect the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from thousands of years ago by taking ice cores from Antarctic ice. We looked at photos of Glacier national park. We read about acidification of the ocean and also talked a bit about fossil fuels and renewable sources of energy.

Our fun with maths continues with some new games, we put some 3d shapes in a bag and took turns to feel one and describe it to the other person to see if they can guess which shape it is. We found describing the number of faces and what flat shapes made them helped the most.
We sorted a big box of shapes and named then then thought about which ones would work for a tower , which shapes would only work well in one orientation and then built a tower.
We made patterns with the shape tiles and tried to see how many lines of symmetry we could find.
We rolled a 10 sided die then named the shape that had that many sides and tried to throw a beanbag on the matching shape card.
We made patterns for each other to complete the missing shapes.

We had a chat about photosynthesis and trees again to see how much Vin remembered from last week’s communigrow.

We read about Europe this week. We looked at a map of Europe with the time zones overlayed. We looked at pictures of Mount Etna and the rainforest in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We watched some traditional Austrian folk dancing (and had a go!) and listened to some Irish and Scottish folk music. We looked at some Italian recipes for sweet treats. Vin looked at a VR app about the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. We admired photos of the Acropolis and views across Athens in Greece.

We looked at the colour wheel and learned about warm and cold colours. Then we sorted our colouring pencils into warm and cold colours and made a cool swirly lined picture and a warm jagged line picture.

We started a new letterbox lab box all about movement and energy. We had a go with a jumping popper and read about stored potential energy.

At communigrow the children worked hard raking up leaves and piling them into the leaf compost heap ready to be broken down by worms and microbes into nice compost for new things to grow in.

We went on a little field trip to bodiam castle as a finale for our castles theme. We looked for the castle features we’d learned about and vin drew a picture of it. We filled in some information about the castle on some activity sheets. At home we read a bit more about the history.

Vin chose some of his toys to write a story about.

We got another book from the library with ideas to make in Scratch. Vin had a go at making another fun game. We added some embellishments and sound effects of our own to make it more exciting.

We read about fungi and mosses and read some nature poems too. We had a little walk with friends round a nature reserve to spot some.

We made a bouncy ball with one of vin’s craft kits.

We read a story in Spanish about the weather and answered some quiz questions then matched the pictures to the words on each page.

Vin wrote a sentence and drew a picture about something he’s enjoyed this week.