Vin's Learning Journey

 We spotted 2D shapes and Vin drew a pattern for a bee hotel with a specific number of triangles, rectangles and pentagons. Then we spotted right angles and parallel lines. We put on some Christmas songs and made some festive perler beads crafts. Vinnie also made a lot of cute mario kart bead art! We watched more of the physics in advent experiments and made predictions of what we thought may happen. Vin played some kahoot to practice his times tables. We did the penultimate lesson in the mystery science theme. It was about the causes of - and how we could protect a town from - landslides. We went to the museum and looked at some of the toys exhibits they have. Then Vinnie made some of his own old fashioned toys. Vin solved a maths mystery to figure out which cheeky elf ate mrs Claus’ Christmas cake. He had to answer a lot of different puzzles to rule out all the suspects. Vin made a board game. We went for a Christmassy walk around knole park and spotted the ‘12 days of Christmas’...

 We played a board game with lots of division practice. We had a go at the Google coding dancing elves game. We watched some physics experiments on the physics advent calendar and tried to predict what we thought may happen. (We watched the first few in German before realising there was an English option so a bit of foreign language practice too!) We did the next mystery science activity called ‘ what did your town look like 100 million years ago?’. We saw how layers of sediment build up over millions of years and compress into different types of rock. We watched some cute videos of water voles and did some maths puzzles about lengths of blade of grass eaten in certain amounts of time. Vin had a good try at some tricky time telling puzzles figuring out the time things started or finished or how long they took based on information given in the little stories. He practiced writing a thank you note - very important skill at this time of year!  Books! The street beneath my feet Gu...

 We watched a video about sparrow hawks and read about food chains. We worked out the mass of different foods in the food chain to find out the total mass of all the plants and animals in it. We did the next lesson in our mystery science lesson. We did an experiment to see what happens to sugar cubes as they are shaken , to simulate what may happen to bits of rock as they tumble down a mountain or down a river. Vinnie did some writing activities about paragraphs. We solved some fiendish fruit weight puzzles and watched a video of a cute sun bear. Vinnie filled in lots of puzzle sheets with Spanish phrases. We drew fountains of gratitude Vinnie solved some tricky scales balancing puzzles with kg and grams muddled and missing weights. Vin made a “museum of Vinnie”. He designed a logo and what exhibits would be inside. And...I forgot to write down what else we did or take many photos! Oops!

 We looked at videos about Sumatran rhinos. Then we solved some puzzles using clues to draw the perimeter of an enclosure for them. We played a game rolling 2 dice and multiplying them together then drawing a shape with the length perimeter. We also came up with some drawings of ponds using squared paper that had to have a specific perimeter. We used a scale of 1 square = 1 metre. Vinnie did some pages about verbs in his English book. We did the next mystery science lesson. We made two different cups of ‘lava’ and did experiments with them to see the differences between cone volcanoes and shield volcanoes and why cone volcanoes explode violently sometimes whereas people can stand and watch shield volcanoes erupting comparatively safely. We learned how sometimes volcanoes erupt so violently that they shoot clouds of ash hundreds of miles away. This gave us more clues about what happened in our overall mystery with the prehistoric rhino fossils. We watched a few other mini mystery vi...

 We practiced measuring in centimetres. We worked out a longest and shortest route for some narwhals through cracks in the ice. Vinnie practiced writing out some sentences changing from past to present tense and vice versa. We worked on the next mystery in our mystery science topic. We plotted the locations of volcanoes around the Pacific ring. We thought about if a volcano is likely to appear where we live. We looked at some extinct volcanoes and plotted them on our map from last week showing where the ash fall fossil beds were found. It didn’t look likely that a volcano could have killed the animals, even an extinct one. We looked at sauropods and practiced estimating their size by measuring fossil bones and multiplying by the scale. We learned about the saguaro cacti in the Sonoran desert. We watched a clip about their seeds and solved some puzzles about different distances that animals had taken the seeds from the main plant. Vinnie wrote a story starring his favourite Smash Br...