What a wonderful first week back we have had, following a well deserved rest over half term! The children have been really excited to read our new core text, The Night Pirates by Peter Harris. We worked together to create a new display for the classroom, thinking about the choppy seas that the pirates would have had to travel across to find treasure! We designed our own sailing contraptions and did a great job writing captions for our boats. It has been lovely to see Ash class using their digraphs more confidently, such as the ‘ai’ in ‘sailing’ and the ‘oa’ in ‘boat’. As a backdrop for our boats, the children loved getting messy with bubble painting, likening it to the sea foam that gathers with big, crashing waves!
We carried on thinking about the sea in P4C, specifically about what we find in the sea. There were lots of suggestions from boats and shells, to turtles, whales and sharks. Though, we noticed that there were also some different items too, such as plastic cups and shopping bags. This then lead to a discussion about whether or not it was ok for plastic to be in the sea and what we could do about it. Here are some of the excellent thoughts and suggestions from the children…
Plastic shouldn’t be in the sea. It might hurt the sea creatures and it’s bad for the environment.
The plastic is hurting all the animals. Plastic is bad for the environment and it can get stuck in their throats.
We could get a fishing rod and fish it out. We could get the shark to pick the rubbish up and throw it in to the net to help the children get it in to the bin.
It is wonderful to hear the children building their confidence as we progress through the year in P4C. We have noticed that more children like to contribute verbally now, and use sentence stems such as ‘I agree/disagree’ to link their ideas to a friend’s. This also indicates that they have been listening hard during the discussions and are more able to follow a conversational thread. Perhaps it’s all the lovely listening practice in yoga that’s giving them their super powers!
This week, we learnt three new poses to add to our movement sequence. The favourite of these was ‘lion’s pose’, or ‘lion’s breath’, which ended up resulting in quite a collective roar!
In maths, we have been working on counting and estimating. We decided to vote on which story we wanted to read at home time. We each had a counter and put it in the jar of our choosing, to indicate our story choice. Once we had all voted, we identified which jar was the fullest, estimated how many counters there might be inside, and checked by counting them out using tens frames. The winning story ended up having 16 votes, meaning we had to use two tens frames to count them all out!
We have also been thinking about the seasons and how each one is different, whilst we patiently wait for Spring to arrive with warmer days! The children enjoyed sorting pictures into the correct seasons and some chose to create some beautiful cherry blossom pictures.
