Term 4

Well its been a while since I posted anything on here. Last term was madness with a production and the move back to my classroom. The classroom looks great. For those who don't know what happened, a pipe burst in the ceiling over winter and cause a lot of mess.

The production called the Button Box and was a lot of hard work, but fun as well. Well done to all the children who work so hard on their parts, the songs and the dances.

This term my class's focus is on mini beasts, watch out all those creatures in the school's gardens and local environment. This week we are looking at worms and have created a worm farm in the classroom. The ultimate classroom pet, they are quiet, make no mess and I only have to feed them once a week. Yay!!!

Weather

Cripes what crazy weather we are having at the moment. Lots of rain and now snow threatening. So what are we doing in the classroom to stop us all from going crazy? Lots of discussions and explorations around weather.

Our question was: 'Where does the all this rain go?' We feel the rain goes down the drain, through the pipes and out to sea. Which is quite a distance to go for all the water as we are a reasonable distance from the sea. We have had some surface flooding out here but it hasn't been as bad as other areas around us. We have talked about how the ground acts likes a sponge and how it is rather full at the moment which is why the rain is sitting on top of the grass rather than soaking in like it normally does.

Discovery

"What is Discovery?" you ask. It is a programme on Friday afternoon that has the children exploring different things. Such as baking, scrap booking and painting. It is reliant on parent help and the skills they can bring to the classroom. Friday was our first session and we had two adults in to help. One taught her group of children how to make the most delicious ginger biscuits, another taught scrap booking and myself took painting. This is an important time for the children as some have never done such things at home. I am hoping for more parents to volunteer as I would like the groups to be as small as 3, so the children get the most of the time. It was a fun afternoon and everyone went home smiling, a great success.

Yummy Maths

Over the last two weeks we have been exploring making bar graphs. We have looked at what they are and what they are used for and the next step was for the children to make their own. Looking at the graphs we have created we discovered that boxing is the most popular sport in Room 1,strawberries are the most popular fruit and pink is our favourite colour.

To create their own graphs the children used coloured blocks and finally for today as our final day on this topic they got to use candy. Very yummy of course and a great motivator for the children to complete their graph. However they couldn't eat them until the task was completed. It was great activity and no one should under estimate the power of food and maths. A big thumbs up from all of us with this graphing unit.

Whoops how time flys

How time has flown away from me this year and so many exciting things we have done in class this year already.
Our highlight for term 1 was making the butter. Very simple and easy to do but created such awe and wonder in the children. They didn't believe me with a jar and some cream you could quickly make some delicious butter. They voted it was better than the shop stuff and they had fun sharing about it with Room 2 next door. Also we explored how to stay safe at school, at home and at the pool. And with a visit from Constable Hocking we learnt about safety around cars and found out how they are all needing a car seat of some sort to stay safe in a car. This is due to their heights and weights. There was a short video on the news a few weeks ago showing what happens if a young child is sitting without a seat and I will see if I can a link to the video for those who are interested.