Gems in a Jar
Did you know that each class have ‘Gems in a jar’?
Show this image to your child and let them tell you whether they have recieved a gem this week!
Children in Robins can earn a gem by putting extra effort into their learning, they can earn a gem by showing kindness to another, they can earn a gem by making the right choice but the gem they look forward to receiving the most is the gem for reading at home. Thank you so much for supporting the reading at home, we are noticing the number of gems we are giving out is increasing each week. The more reads they do at home in a week (Friday to Friday), the more gems they get to put in the jar - they get so excited by this! Our aim is to fill the jar and then…..this is the really exciting part - we get to have a class treat, it may be an extra play, it may be a film, it may be an extra session on the adventure playground…..we will let the children come up with ideas!!!!
Our Learning this Week
(We offer no apology for the amount of photos this week - we are just so proud of all the effort and learning that the children do and we just want to share as much of it as we can with you)
Despite the foggy start to the week, it didn’t stop us jumping straight into exploring and learning, with Reception starting the week with a number activity where they worked hard to find all the ways they could represent the numbers 1-5. The children loved exploring which objects showed the different numbers and were able to confidently recognise the numbers in their written form.
We also saw some lovely teamwork going on when the boys decided to build a train track that went around the back wall of the rainforest! Despite the first bridge collapsing, the boys changed the pieces, whilst keeping their dreams of a bumpy track! “Look at how high the trains go Mrs Brown, up and down!”
Our Duplo tower reached high into the rainforest and almost touched the canopy above! We discussed how we could make it more secure by adding another column of bricks, this led to the children working together and exploring which bricks made it “all wobbly” and how we could make it stronger. By the time we were finished our tower stood tall and strong amongst the vines of the rainforest!
On Monday afternoon we joined Kingfishers for an exciting Science session, where we explored materials and their properties, discussing which materials were appropriate or the best choice for making different objects. Our science experiment needed a person to test four different chairs- a wooden chair, a plastic chair, a paper chair and a cardboard chair! Mrs Brown stepped up to the challenge and drum roll after drum roll tested the chairs….needless to say some testing ended with a bump! Mrs Brown had indeed become our very own Goldilocks!
The week continued with our reception children continuing to explore counting to 5, collecting different objects to use to place on each finger and recognising that the total remained the same. Our Year 1 children moved onto looking at the part-whole model, recognising what the whole was and then separating this out into 2 parts and exploring the different ways you could do this.
In our design and technology lesson this week, we continued learning about pop-up mechanisms and moved onto making our very own pop-strip mechanism whilst also learning about the importance of road safety.
For our reception children we moved onto exploring colouring mixing, using chalks to explore what happened when we mixed our primary colours. They were so excited to make green, purple and orange!
On Wednesday, in our Topic learning, we revisited the story of Guy Fawkes. Whilst Year 1 were recording their story by creating a story map, our reception children were busy creating a different sort of story map - they used loose parts! Can you work out the story from their sequence - it is fantastic!
Thursday morning the children continued to explore the number 5, using ten frames to understand that the number stays the same but can be represented in different ways. They then worked together to build a farm which lived next door to a castle! They used small world people to act out stories and especially enjoyed the knights. In the tuff tray they really enjoyed making Pudsey bear all spotty, using tweezers to develop their pincer grips!
And finally……
