A Week of Investigation, Observation and Discovery

This week we finished our Colour and Pattern topic and said a sad goodbye to our space station classroom. It has been a fantastic week full of exciting opportunities for learning and development.

We watched the first landing on the moon and the more recent Atlantis shuttle launch to discuss and compare space travel through the ages. It has been lovely to hear the Bears using the space vocabulary they have learnt when playing in our space station role play, and with the large rockets they have created. We have written like an astronaut, created speech bubbles for our aliens, and have written sentences to describe the aliens we painted on the computer.

 

In maths, we are building on our understanding of the composition of numbers by investigating the composition of numbers 4 and 5. We have investigated part-part-whole relations with dice, number cards and linking cubes. This helps us to understand that 5 can be composed of 3 and 2. We can recognise that numbers can be made by combining parts in different ways. We have made patterns of 4 and 5 with the linking cubes and used our spatial language to describe them, e.g There are 3 in the middle, and 1 on top. Then the whole is 4 or 3 and 1 make 4.

This week we were introduced to 3D shapes, and we used the 3D shapes to build rockets.

The Bears were excited to create their painted pants toast on Friday afternoon. They used a knife to cut their bread into the shape of a pair of pants, then painted the bread with milk and food colouring. Next we toasted the bread, added margarine and ate our pants! 

In our practical area we explored the sensory trays of alien slime, moon dough and gloop. We thought the gloop was interesting because if we squished it together it was 'hard' (a solid) but when we opened our hand the gloop began to 'melt' and became a liquid.  

Our rocket balloon experiment was so exciting that we did 3 times! I hope you have had a chance to watch the video that I uploaded to Tapestry. It makes me smile every time I see it! 

We also carried out an experiment to observe the fizzy reaction of vinegar when added to water, food colouring and bicarbonate of soda. This video is on Tapestry too. The thumbnail picture at the top of this post is a still of the children's reactions to the experiment. Brilliant!

I wish you all a fabulous half-term break and look forward to the children sharing their holiday news when we return to school on Tuesday the 22nd February.