Posting Letters

Earlier this week we carried out an investigation to help Mir's mum. She wanted to find out which material would be best for soaking up some water, so we tested a few materials to find out the answer. 

Once we'd got our results we thought we'd share them with all our mums and dads, so we wrote some letters to tell them what we'd found out. We put the letters in envelopes, found out our addresses from the school office (thank you Mr Farrell!), and invited some parents to walk to the letter box near our school with us. 

Thanks to the parents who were able to come with us - it made us feel much safer having so many helpful grown ups with us. Thanks also to the parents who've already let us know that they've received their letters. Feel free to write back to us - you can post letters to us at school or message us here or on Twitter - as we'd love to know what you think about our investigation. 

Which material would be best to soak up a spillage?

On Monday we got a Twitter message from Mir's Mum. She knew we were learning about materials and wanted us to help her with a problem: she spilled some water while she was watering her plants and wondered whether we could find out which material would be the best to soak it up.

We had a lot of fun (as well as practicing our Science investigation skills) finding out the answer, as you can hopefully see from our photos. Thanks to Miss Longley for helping us to think about how to make our test fair, teaching us how to measure and record our results properly, and encouraging us to use the word 'absorbent'.

Which material do you think soaked up water the best: foil; kitchen roll; cling film; a cloth; or a sponge? Come and ask us to tell you what we found out! 

Pasta Play

One of our favourite continuous provision activities this half term has definitely been using pasta letters to match those in some given words. Here we are trying to match letters in words from We're Going on a Bear Hunt:

Carnivores, Herbivores and Omnivores

Last week at school we learned that scientists like to group animals depending on the types of food they eat. We learned some new words: 'carnivore', 'herbivore' and 'omnivore' and sorted some animal cards using hoops. Then we drew and grouped our own animals.

Can you tell a grown up at home what the words 'carnivore', 'herbivore' and 'omnivore' mean? 

Thank you!

Thanks to all the mums and dads (and grandmas and grandads!) who stay to help with our early work each morning. Last week, before we went on our trip to see We're Going on a Bear Hunt at the theatre, you helped the children to write some fantastic sentences on their whiteboards. Here's a few of their excellent pieces of work:

Halves and Quarters

Today we learned some new fraction words: half and quarter. We went out to our school playground where Mr Ellis pretended to be an evil robot master. We pretended to be his army of robots and had to follow his instructions to rotate different numbers of quarter turns.

Then, back in class, we chopped up (and ate!) some fruit to show that the words 'half' and 'quarter' can mean part of a whole thing - like a banana or an apple - as well as describing how far you've rotated. 

Can you think of other things you could find halves and quarters of? 

Toca Lego

We used some Lego and the iPad app Toca Builders to practise using position language like 'left', 'right', 'above', 'below', and 'rotate', as well as counting the numbers of blocks. We had to try and give clear instructions to our partner so that they could make the Lego wall or tower that we had constructed. 

Didn't these children do a fantastic job!