Vin's Learning Journey

 We looked at some videos of donkeys at donkey sanctuaries and solved some money puzzles about possible coins that could have been given in change at the donkey gift shop. We played the fraction matching game. Vin’s pretty speedy at spotting fractions now. Vinnie practiced rewriting some sentences using the correct pronouns to replace repeated nouns. Vin showed good perseverance building a model pirate ship. We looked at different fossils and learned a bit about Mary Anning who discovered dinosaur fossils in Lyme Regis. We solved some money puzzles about numbers of fossils sold for different amounts of money. Vin chose another Scratch project to work on. He made a flappy bird type game with a flying hippo. Keeping with our tectonic plates theme, we started a new mystery science unit called ‘the birth of rocks’ . We learned about the Ashfall Fossil beds in Nebraska and thought about how fossils of prehistoric rhinos could have been found in the middle of North America. We made some ...

 We watched a video of some straw coloured fruit bats travelling to a mango forest in Zambia. We looked at the map and saw where the tropics were - where a lot of megabats live, and looked up where the Kasanka National park is. We compared our arm span to the great flying fox’s wing span. We solved some puzzles with fractions to work out how many mangoes different bats ate. Then we watched a clip of some baboons and elephants eating mangoes at a safari lodge. Vinnie made a puzzle up to solve with how many mangoes they ate. Vin had a go at proofreading an article, spotting various spelling and punctuation errors and correcting them. We watched the final tectonic plates video. This time about tsunamis. We saw how they were caused and thought about ways to protect from and prepare for them. We talked about some books we’d read recently. Then Vin rewrote the blurb to one of his books in his own words. We solved some more fraction puzzles working out how much of a leaf different caterpi...

We watched a video about animals at a waterhole and did some practice multiplying by 4 and 2. We watched the next video about tectonic plates and learned about ways to prepare for earthquakes and various different buildings that have had modifications or were designed to be more resistant to earthquakes. Vin put together a puzzle of all the tectonic plates and we looked at where the joins were and which countries were found there. Vin drew a picture of what he would put in a kit to prepare for if there was an earthquake. (That’s a lighter, not a gun, he’s not planning to go on a rampage in the event of a natural disaster). We listened to some Spanish alphabet songs, and Vin did some puzzles from our Spanish activity book. We practiced spotting nouns and proper nouns in an activity book. We did some ladybird themed puzzles that practiced 4 and 7 times tables. Vinnie did some writing activities from a book. Learning about editing writing, combining or splitting sentences to make them eas...

 We solved some number puzzles about squirrels solving a maze and finding the route with the lowest and highest totals. We watched a mini mystery science about how earthquakes happen. Vin watched some other mini mysteries as well. We tried some puzzles and riddles from a game but then found the age was 14+ and they were a bit challenging for Vinnie but he had a good go and came up with some good theories. We looked at giant armadillos and learned about how other animals use their burrows. We solved some puzzles to do with the different numbers of animals and the number of letters in their names. We watched the next tectonics theme video. We learned about earthquakes and how they are measured. We sorted the observations on the Mercalli scale into order and Vin drew illustrations for some of them. We read about the Richter scale and how seismographs work. Vinnie did lots of column addition and subtraction practice. V did some handwriting practice copying some sentences and wrote the ...