Download a copy of this Term's Curriculum please click here
For the second part of our 'All Creatures Great and Small' topic, we will be looking at minibeasts. Today we introduced the children to minibeasts, explaining what they are and sorting out mini beasts in to different categories. After that we went on a minibeast hunt in the garden. Ask your child to tell you what a minibeast is (does it have a spine? is it big or small?).
Topic was lots of fun this week. We had a special week full of art. We learnt about silhouettes and made a beautiful sunset scene with a dinosaur silhouette. The children learnt how to use watercolours to make their sunset and did some amazing cutting out. We did some observational drawing. We learnt about 'bling drawing' and observational drawing and then did our own observational drawings. We sat down and drew dinosaurs that were on the table. We also learnt about junk modelling and then made our own 3D dinosaurs with masking take, paper and tissue. This task would have been the perfect opportunity to teach the children about abstract sculpture as our creations all ended up looking particularly individual/original!
In maths this week we combined groups together, specifically using the words combine and altogether during the lesson. We combine groups of people and did lots of table activities! Ask your child what combine and altogether means! We also looked at height and length. We ordered piece of string from longest to shortest, we ordered ourselves by our heights, and we made groups of long and short objects.
Mini beast adventures next week in early years.
This week, in topic, we learnt about Dinosaurs. We learnt specifically about fossils, how fossils form and the famous fossil hunter Mary Anning. We saw some real fossils! We made our own fossil by imprinting a dinosaur into Playdough, we did drawings of fossils and matched dinosaurs to their fossils amongst other things.
Palaeontologist role play: a lot of large fossils can be found in Ramsgate as seen below.
Making out own fossils:
This week we have been learning about mass and capacity.
When looking at mass we learnt how to use scales, how to estimate using ourselves as human scales and how to order items by their mass. You could ask your children about how heavy or light an object is, which object is the heaviest or lightest, or as a challenge, order objects according to their mass.
When looking at capacity we learnt about containers and which one would be best for Mr. Jones and Mrs Smart to use if they were reallllyyyyy thirsty (a unanimous vote for the largest container). We each had a cup and filled them with sand, water, pompoms, beads, pegs or loose parts. You could ask your children to tell you when containers they use are full, empty, almost empty or almost full, as a challenge you could ask them to tell you when their cup is half full (or debate if its half empty to bring some philosophy to your evening or weekend)
Using scales, one stones mass is equal to the mass of multiple corks:
Have we overloaded the scales? A debate that wasn't concluded.
Trying, and succeeding, to balance a set of scales:
Organising by mass; we learnt that size doesn't always mean an object has more mass, here, our object with the smallest mass was the largest by size!
Capacity! This container is almost full:
Shock in Ramsgate as we find out.....
Comparing mass
Gardening!
We have discovered some eggs near the bike track, what is in them?
Numbers are everywhere!
Parent reading, every Wednesday at 2.40pm.