Class 2 have thoroughly enjoyed participating in British Science Week this week and have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into all activities. I have really enjoyed seeing the children posting on Seesaw that they have been reading lots of STEM based books including choosing some from our school virtual library. I am hoping that I have lots of reading challenge certificates to give out on Monday! On Tuesday, all of Key Stage One were excited to take part in an engineering workshop led by one of our parents, Mr Crawforth. After being shown a presentation of projects that Mr Crawforth has worked on, the pupils worked collaboratively in small groups to build a structure, a minimum of 15cm tall, that was capable of supporting one of our counting bears. On Wednesday morning, another parent, Mr Wade. lead a whole school assembly to talk about his career as a medical researcher and lecturer in genetics which the children found fascinating. Then, on Thursday, Mr Arnott brought his extremely large tractor to school and talked to Key Stage One about the crops grown on his farm. As a school we are extremely fortunate and greatly appreciative of the support we receive from parents and wider family members.
In addition to these visits, class 2 also created posters on the theme of Growth for the British Science Week Poster competition. Mrs Carey, our science governor, will be in school to judge each class’s shortlisted posters and we will send the winning entries off to the main national competition. The children also completed a pattern seeking investigation into ‘are the oldest children in the class the tallest?’. To start with they physically arranged themselves into height order on the playground and then re-arranged themselves into birthday order to compare the height differences. Finally they have used their maths skills to represent their results in block graphs and their English skills to write their conclusions.
Despite being extremely busy with these activities, we also completed our diary recounts unit this week where the children were writing as if they were a animal living in the wild, fraction work in maths and apostrophe work in spelling!
Here is one of the Quick Start maths activities that the class tackled this week. They complete these daily and each one builds on the maths skills recapped the day before so that all the basic maths skills they need are being repeated and consolidated.
Please do also encourage your child to access the 2dos on Purple Mash which are maths, English and theme related and also practice times tables skills on TTRockstars and general maths games at https://www.topmarks.co.uk/Search.aspx?Subject=16&AgeGroup=2
I have also recommended the White Rose One Minute Maths app previously on our class Seesaw account. This really is a quick and easy (and free!) app to practice key mental maths skills for Key Stage One pupils. Free to download from the App store or Google Play.
