It’s been another great week in P3/4!
During Healthy Hearts we’ve been trying really hard to work together as a class to do as many laps as possible – some days we are reaching over 70 laps between us! We’re going to keep a daily total and work out the distance we travelled at the end of term.
In maths, we’ve been reviewing our work on patterns and extending this to exploring numerical patterns. As part of this we had our first go at ‘Counting Collections’. In pairs we estimated the size of our collection, agreed on a way to organise the collection and then counted it. Some of us counted in ones, others in threes, fours or fives. We then started to find different ways of working out the total using different number facts that we are familiar with. We then had a class discussion on the different approaches and discussed patterns we noticed, ideas that helped us and ways that we might improve.
We had our first go at ‘Choral Counting’ which also involved putting our pattern spotting skills to work. As a class we spotted a huge range of patterns that helped us to think about numbers in different ways.
We also played some games with the Cuisenaire Rods to begin to get familiar with the rods and the relationships between them. We’ll be using these versatile little rods to help us understand all sorts of things in maths throughout the year from patterns, whole number calculations, fractions and they can even be used to make sense of algebra!
In literacy, we’ve been learning about the comprehension strategy of ‘visualising’ and thinking about creating a movie in our mind as we read the text to help us understand what we’re reading. This ties in well with our writing focus on descriptive language. We’ve also been working on our spelling words – this week the focus was on the short vowel sound ‘a’. After thinking about the spelling of some shorter words like ‘pat’ and ‘map’ we grew these into more complex words like patting, patted, mapping and mapped! Can you spot any patterns in how these words change as these different endings are added?
For health and wellbeing we’ve continued to learn about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and have now voted on the four rights that we think are most relevant to include as part of our Class Charter. We’re looking forward to creating a classroom display for this on a theme of our choosing and will share it with you when it’s finished. In the coming weeks we’ll learn more about these rights and how we can respect them for ourselves and others.
Finally, a highlight of the week has been getting to play with the Kapla! As part of this we’ve been learning about and practising a huge range of important life skills including problem solving, assessing risks, sharing and turn taking, including others, and self-regulation when some of our impressive structures eventually came tumbling down!
