We are continuing our Growing and Changing topic by learning about minibeasts this term. This week we asked the question ‘what do we know about spiders?’ We learned many facts about spiders such as how many legs they have, how many eyes, what they eat and how they spin a web.  We watched a spider spin a web on a time lapse video.  It was amazing!  We also learned why spiders don’t stick to their web, yet other insects do – before they eat them!  We did an experiment, where we made a sticky web from sticky tape and threw small toy insects onto it.  They stuck.  We then touched the web and found we also stuck. We then put a little oil on our hands and tried touching it again and we did not stick!  We found out that spiders have an oil on their legs which stops them sticking to their webs.

We made a drainpipe spider (just like Incy Wincy). We used cardboard tubes, painted them black like a drainpipe and then made a spider, which climbed up the drainpipe.  We had to use our cutting and joining skills to engineer the spider to move with a simple sliding mechanism. 

We were so happy see that one of the peahens chicks had hatched!  From the remaining 4 eggs, 1 had gone missing and we suspect the magpies took it.  They had been hovering around all day on Thursday.  Then at lunchtime, one magpie took an egg, but then dropped another egg, which was really sad.  We hope the remaining 2 eggs will hatch.

We are so lucky to have 6 chicken eggs in an incubator, lent to us by Jacob and Emmie Lowe's dad.  We are taking care of them and are told that they should hatch in 21 days!  We will mark the date on our calendar and keep an eye on how long away it is each day.

In English, we continued the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and recapped our story maps from last week.  We innovated them by changing the character from a caterpillar to another minibeast of our choice and then chose different foods for it to eat.  We put all this into a story plan and retold our innovated version.  Next week we will write our stories.

We also learned all about doubles this week.  We learned the concept of double as the same amount twice.  We used a mirror to look at a number of objects and see it doubled in the mirror.  We then recorded the amounts pictorially.  We played lots of doubling games, using dominoes and dice and even on our fingers.

Our Monster Phonics this week, we have been practising reading and writing ccvcc words using our previously taught digraphs.  We also continued to write and use our 3 new tricky words – ‘time, out, house, about’.  Please continue to read with your child regularly.  It really makes a difference to their confidence and fluency. Please also continue to use spelling shed.  Again, this really helps the children to develop confidence and fluency with their segmenting and spelling skills. 

Please see our Forest Learning section on our class webpage to see what we got up to this week.

Have a lovely weekend.