Arts Week

We have had avery busy and exciting Arts Week. We were learning about the Russian artist Wassily  Kandinsky.

We learnt that he felt he could hear music as he painted and see  colours when he heard music. We listened to some music and painted what we could hear just like Kandinsky. You can listen to the music here

 

 

 

 We looked very carefully at his painting  Concentric Circles

 

We all contributed to a large version of this painting. We have also recreated his famous circles out of clay, wet felting and with ripped paper. You can see us hard at work here.

 

 

On Friday all our wonderful work went into the hall as part of a whole school exhibition - it looked amazing. What do you think?

 

 

 

 

 

Minibeasts

We have had great fun this term learning about different insects and minibeasts in our garden. We have been particularly fascinated by the snails. We listened to a story about Slimy the snail and the trial he went on so we collected lots of snails from our garden and made them a snail playpark in one of our trays!! We put them back where we found them afterwards but it was lovely to see them coming out of their shells and be able to observe them close up. Lots of us have also be very busy planting out all the seeds we started growing at the beginning of term and we now have beans, pumpkins, potatoes, strawberries,courgettes and sunflowers growing in the garden - hopefully the slugs and snails won't eat them during half term!!

Egg-citing news!!

Well we put some eggs in the incubator at the beginning of the term. Hen eggs have to stay in the incubator for 21 days before they hatch. After they had been in the incubator for about a week we checked them using a special light called candling lamp this heps us to see inside the eggs unfortunately when we looked none of our eggs had chicks growing inside them this time. Luckily we have just been gven some more eggs which definitely have chicks inside them and which are ready to hatch - tomorrow should be very interesting!!!
Here they are in the incubator check back tomorrow to see what has happened overnight...

Homebase visit

As part of our planning for learning this term we all had the opportunity to go shopping in Homebase to buy the things we need for our garden. It was great fun and we had plenty to look at and talk about during our visit.

 

Let's Get Growing

Our learning this term is based around the theme of growing. We started be thinking about what we would like to learn and what we already know - you can see our learning questions in the classroom. We have been learning the story of The Enormous Turnip in storymaking and we have made some great storymaps to help us retell the story as well as doing some super writing.
We listened to this book and it inspired us to think of  how we could make things grow in our garden - we had lots of ideas!!
 So we decided to write a shopping list just like Eddie did in the book and then we went to Homebase in small groups to do our shopping. We have bought lots of different seeds, pansies, violas, stawberries and a tomato plant. We also bought some petunias -they were special ones for the Queen!!

We have already read instructions and planted some pumpkin and sunflower seeds. We are also experimenting with some bean seeds to see whether they will grow in just a wet paper towel ...
some of us think they will and some of us don't think they will - we will have to see whose predictions are right.

We are also excited about an experiment that is happening in Year 5. As part of our earlier learning about space and Tim Peake we applied to be part of  a very special experiment called


we have been sent  rocket seeds some of which have been on  the ISS with Tim Peake now scientists want us to help them find out whether being in space affects the seeds or not.The children in Year 5 have planted the seeds and we can't wait to find out what happens.

You can watch this film to learn more about the seeds.

Dinosaurs

Another part of our learning this term is based around dinosaurs. We have thought of some questions for our learning and we have set up a dinosaur investigation centre in our role play area. We have been busy making dinosaur posters and finding out facts about the different dinosaurs. This week we have talked about what dinosaurs eat and we have found out that meat eating dinosaurs were called carnivores and the ones that ate plants were called herbivores. We have been thinking about what we like eating what foods are healthy.
We have had visit this week from Molly's mum who is a dental nurse, she talked to us about how to brush our teeth properly and how to keep our teeth healthy.

Bird Watch

We made bird feeders to hang in our garden to attract the birds - we have already seen several different birds including starlings, blackbirds, blue tits, sparrows, pigeons and magpies. We now seem to have a pair of starlings nest building under the roof!!!

 We also used playdough and different  natural materials to build our birds a nest.