Pasta Play

One of our favourite continuous provision activities this half term has definitely been using pasta letters to match those in some given words. Here we are trying to match letters in words from We're Going on a Bear Hunt:

Carnivores, Herbivores and Omnivores

Last week at school we learned that scientists like to group animals depending on the types of food they eat. We learned some new words: 'carnivore', 'herbivore' and 'omnivore' and sorted some animal cards using hoops. Then we drew and grouped our own animals.

Can you tell a grown up at home what the words 'carnivore', 'herbivore' and 'omnivore' mean? 

Thank you!

Thanks to all the mums and dads (and grandmas and grandads!) who stay to help with our early work each morning. Last week, before we went on our trip to see We're Going on a Bear Hunt at the theatre, you helped the children to write some fantastic sentences on their whiteboards. Here's a few of their excellent pieces of work:

Halves and Quarters

Today we learned some new fraction words: half and quarter. We went out to our school playground where Mr Ellis pretended to be an evil robot master. We pretended to be his army of robots and had to follow his instructions to rotate different numbers of quarter turns.

Then, back in class, we chopped up (and ate!) some fruit to show that the words 'half' and 'quarter' can mean part of a whole thing - like a banana or an apple - as well as describing how far you've rotated. 

Can you think of other things you could find halves and quarters of? 

Toca Lego

We used some Lego and the iPad app Toca Builders to practise using position language like 'left', 'right', 'above', 'below', and 'rotate', as well as counting the numbers of blocks. We had to try and give clear instructions to our partner so that they could make the Lego wall or tower that we had constructed. 

Didn't these children do a fantastic job! 

Bean Bag Buckets

We've been LOVING practising our number bonds by playing Bean Bag Buckets. Come and ask us to show you how it's played. It's a lot of fun! 

Sharing Equally

These amazing mathematicians worked so well on sharing groups of 'marbles' between Max the Puppy and Kermit the Frog that I asked them whether they could try and share a bigger group of marbles between three animals. They managed to work out how to equally share them really quickly.

Super skills, mathematicians!

Number Race

One of our big class maths targets at the moment is to be able to count backwards from twenty. Lots of us find it a bit tricky. We've been enjoying practising our skills by playing 'Number Race', a game where boys and girls race to put the number cards/bean bags in the right order first.

Do you know how to count back to zero from twenty?

We can share things equally

We had lots of fun this afternoon helping Kermit the Frog and Max the Puppy share different things from our classroom equally. We helped them to share groups of cubes, bears, even scissors. 

We found that some numbers could be shared out equally, but when you tried to share some other numbers it didn't seem fair because one of the animals always got an extra one. 

Which numbers can be shared equally? Can you see a pattern in them? 

We can give clear instructions

This afternoon we practised giving clear instructions to a partner. We had to sit back to back with a partner, and one of us had to make a pattern with beads. Then we had to describe it carefully so that our partner could make the same pattern on their string. It's trickier than it sounds!

Max and Kermit's Sharing Problem

Max the Puppy and Kermit the Frog have collected all of their marbles together for a game. They know that the total number is more than 10. They also know that the marbles can be shared out equally. 

After lots of talk about what the word equal means we worked in pairs to try and help our animal friends solve their problem. 

It was fantastic to see pairs improve at working together while they tried to solve the problem, and to begin to understand that the wrong answers are often just as useful as the right ones. 

Platefuls of tasty addition and subtraction

Yesterday afternoon one of our Maths groups worked with Rasha to practise their addition and subtraction skills. They did a super job of calculating the answers to some tricky questions. And, of course, they got to eat the raisins for all their hard work!

Well done, mathematicians!