What a great first week back after the half-term! I hope you have all had a restful break and it is good to see the Hedgehogs all settled back into routine. Look below to see what we have been learning about this week.

Maths

In our Maths learning this week, we have been learning all about number bonds to 20. We have been learning about what pairs of numbers add together to make 20. We have used resources such as numicons, ten frames and dienes to build number bonds to 20. We also learned that there are 21 number bonds to 20! We also looked at doubling this week. A double is two numbers that are the same added together. We played a game where we had to find dominos in the class that had doubles and we had to work out their combined values. Can you figure out the number bonds to 20 below? You may want to write an addition sentence to help you!

You can also go on TopMarks and play "Hit the Button" - Number Bonds to 20 to help you!

English

In our English learning this week, we have continued our work on recount writing. This week, we innovated the recount from before half term. We learned about a girl's life in the countryside of Kenya, and we talked about similarities and differences between her life and a boy in the city of Kenya. You can find the video here if you wanted to learn more. We then created story maps about her life. 

We then worked in pairs to write sentences about the innovate. We thought about features that we needed in a recount, such as using time conjunctions, writing in the 1st person (we, me), and using conjunctions to add extra information. 

Here are some pictures of our new story map. Can you tell your grown-up a sentence to go with each part of the recount?

Geography

In our Geography learning this week, we have been learning about what life is like in a Kenya village. We first read the story of Mama Panya Pancakes, which is a book about life in the village. We drew pictures of things we saw in the book about what village life is like.

We then had an exciting Wednesday as we learned about other types of villages. We learned about tribes that live in Kenya. These groups of people are called nomads, which means they move from place to place. We particularly looked at the Maasai Mara tribe and how they live. We learned a few words of their language such as hello, yes and no! We then looked at their traditions and customs. We learned that the men normally go out hunting and the women stay and build the mud huts! We also looked at the masks that they sometimes wear. The Maasai wear masks to celebrate, to pray for good harvest, or to honour those that have passed away. We designed and created our own masks and the children worked so hard on them! See if you can find your mask below!

Art

In our Art this week, we have moved onto our new unit called Sculpture and 3D play. We looked at what a sculpture is and how it is a piece of art that you can see from different viewpoints. They are 3D. We created 'Tube Towers' out of paper and combined them to create 3D sculptures. Here is some of our work below!

Computing

We also worked on using Bee-Bots in our computing as we move onto our new unit all about "Programming". We had a go at playing with Bee-bots and using them to get from one part of a map to another part of the map.

Spellings (available on Spelling Shed)

I sent out a Parenthub earlier this week asking if parents can provide any plastic bottles for a future Science experiment that we are doing in two weeks. We will be making sand timers so it would be helpful if we could have two bottles that are the same size! If you have any, we would really appreciate it!

Have a lovely weekend and I look forward to seeing many of you next week during our Parents' Evening Consultations.

Mr Armishaw