This week we have been learning ‘Who was Vincent van Gogh?’.  We looked at his famous painting ‘Sunflowers’ and talked about the colours, whether we like it, how it made us feel and what we thought it might be called.  We learned about the artist, that he lived more than 150 years ago and looked at some of his other paintings too.  We like ‘Starry Night’ and ‘The Potato Eaters’ too!  We all then painted sunflowers of our own, just like van Gogh did all those years ago.  They look fantastic. 

Continuing our theme of growing and The Enormous Turnip, we thought about how heavy the turnip must have been and that the farmer needed all those people and animals to help him to pull it out.  We looked at other ways to help things to be lifted, and learned about pulleys.  The children then made pulleys outside to life heavy bottles of water, by throwing a long rope over a tree branch, with the bottle attached to one end and pulled the other.  It was such good fun and they learned a lot about force, mass, gravity and team work!

We continued the story of The Enormous Turnip in our writing by using the story plan that we innovated last week to write our own story.  We said a sentence for each part of the story plan and carefully wrote it down; trying hard to remember spaces, capital letters for some children and full stops.  The children are becoming much more fluent and independent in their writing which is fantastic!

We looked at 2D shape in maths and used lots of language to describe the shapes.  We talked about the properties of each one; number of sides, corners, curved or straight and length of the lines.  We then explored a Tangram, which is a special square made from many shapes that fit together.  The children enjoyed putting the tangram back together and using the shapes to made a new shape picture of their own.

In PSHE we discussed feelings and how some feelings can make us feel bad, such as sadness, anger, jealousy, worry etc.  We blew up a balloon and compared it to how we might feel full of an emotion, just like a full balloon and if we let those feelings continue we feel like we might explode!  Just like the balloon.  We let the air out of the balloon gradually and thought of ways we can let out those emotions gradually, without resorting to shouting, and tantrums etc.  We came up with ideas like breathing deeply and slowly, hugging a friend, talking to someone, reading a book, resting someone quiet, etc.  Hopefully the children can remember these strategies when they feel overwhelmed.

Baking

We made rock cakes this week!  They were delicious.  See the Baking section on the class webpage.

Forest School

We drew pictures of plants just like van Gogh.  Please see the Forest School section on our class webpage.

Homework

Please continue to read regularly with your child at home.  It really is making a great difference.  Don’t forget you can also access extra online reading books on Bug Club.

https://www.activelearnprimary.co.uk/login?c=0

Spelling Shed

Please support your child to practise sounding out and spelling their words on the Spelling Shed app. It helps them to use and apply the sounds they have learned recently in phonics.  This week we are practising words containing the “or” digraph.  The children score points every time they practise their spellings on spelling shed and each class competes against each other for fun.  The top three scoring classes are read out in assembly each week.  Let’s see if our Robins can get onto the leader board next week.

https://play.edshed.com/en-gb/

Maths Shed

The children can also access Maths Shed through the same site as Spelling Shed.  They have new ‘assignments’ which are games that explore numbers to 10, so please have a play!

https://play.edshed.com/en-gb/login

Have a great weekend.