Wonderful Winter
Week beginning 7th February
Our book of the week this week was 'The Emperor's Egg', and was all about a daddy penguin looking after an egg until it hatched and the penguin chick was born. We discussed whether we would like to spend two months with an egg on our feet in the freezing cold without any food - most of us said no! We found out lots of other information about emperor penguins including that they use their wings to swim and not to fly. We also found out that penguins live in Antarctica and wrote lists of the things we would take on an adventure there. We enjoyed exploring ice and seeing how it changed as the day went on. We practised our observational painting skills too, painting both penguins from photos and a vase of daffodils.
Week beginning 31st January
This week we learnt all about Chinese New Year. We found out it is the year of the tiger and found out all about how it is celebrated. We explored lots of different resources linked to China and we even had a try at using chopsticks! We enjoyed making our own music to accompany the dragon dance and practised writing and painting different Chinese symbols. We loved exploring outside too this week in the lovely sunshine, and snow!
Week beginning 24th January
Our book of the week this week was ‘You’re Snug With Me’, a story all about a polar bear and her cubs living in their den until the cubs were ready to explore the Arctic. We built dens of our own for different animals and thought about how to keep them snug in their dens like the polar bears. We used foam peanuts and sugar cubes to build igloos, just like we saw in photos and videos of the Arctic. We practised our drawing skills and thought about our own families and drew pictures of them. In Maths we learnt about capacity. We looked at different containers, including our own water bottles and described them using words such as full, empty, half full and nearly empty.
Week beginning 17th January
This week we learnt all about stars and space. We read lots of books about stars and space including 'How to Catch a Star', 'Whatever Next' and lots of non-fiction books. We worked really hard with our writing this week and wrote a list of the things we would take to space with us. We enjoyed printing using star cutters to create our own starry pictures and used tweezers to catch stars of our own. We ended the week with creating fizzy bath bomb planets.
Week beginning 10th January
This week we read the story 'The Gruffalo's Child' by Julia Donaldson. We used characters from the story to retell it in our own words. We looked at different animal tracks in the snow from the story and created our own - unfortunately there was no snow so we used mud instead! We found out about how different animals keep warm in the Winter. We learnt that some hibernate, some migrate and some adapt. We finished the week exploring different polar animals in Gelli Baff - we loved it! In Maths we consolidated our learning of finding one more and one less of numbers to 10. We also learnt all about 0!
Week beginning 5th January
This week we reminded ourselves all about Winter. We thought about how the weather changes in Winter and what we can do to keep warm. We looked at pictures of Winter trees and compared them to what they looked like in Autumn. We used cotton buds and paint to experiment with different ways of painting Winter trees of our own.
