This week we have been learning all about Antarctica! The children learned where on the globe it is and lots of facts about it, such as it is the coldest place on Earth.  It is covered in snow and has just 2 seasons – summer and winter.  When it’s winter it is almost always dark and in summer almost always light!  They know that no people live on Antarctica, but scientists stay there for a few weeks at a time.  It is too cold to live there and there are no houses or roads.  They also know that penguins live there – but no polar bears.  Ask your child why!

We all worked together to make a large 3D model of Antarctica.  We use boxes to model the shape of glaciers, ice sheets and ice bergs.  We covered it in newspaper and painted it in sparkly white paint with glitter.  It looks so cold and icy!  We painted the sea in blue and added penguins and whales onto the model.  It looks great.

We enjoyed investigating ice and tried to free the penguin and whale from the ice!  They had been frozen inside and we tried to melt the ice in different ways.  We had the idea to use hot water, use spoons to chip away at the ice, breathe on the ice, hold the ice and put it in water.

In English, we wrote up our innovated stories based on Rosie’s Walk.  The children wrote their version of the story using the own animal character and where they went on their walk.  They did really well to write a few sentences and used a word bank for tricky words in the story.

In maths we explored the composition of 6,7 and 8.  We looked at numbers within 6,7 and 8 and saw what they looked like on a ten frame. We found we could subitise these amounts using out ‘conceptual subitising’ skills.  (eg we knew an amount was 6 because we could see a 4 and a 2, or a 3 and a 3).  This is great for the children’s early understanding of calculation.  We also drew 1-8 on ten frames and labelled the amounts with the correct numeral.

In Monster Phonics this week, we have learned the phoneme ‘ur’.  We read and wrote many words containing this sound.  Please see the Monster Phonics section, as usual, to practise the sounds learned so far.  I have also added a video of the Monster actions of the long vowel sounds.

We loved creating our own maps in Forest Learning.  Please see that section on our webpage.

Have a lovely weekend!