Space

This week we have continued to learn lots about Space.

The youngest children (Sergi, Kai,Luke and Ona) have had lots of fun creating the role play space area. They have worked hard as a team and Sergi was particularly concentrated when covering three boxes in tinfoil to make a fantastic rocket. The children are now enjoying using the astronaut and alien masks and pretending to fly off in the rocket. They also enjoyed helping me to create a dark ‘space’ reading area. Ona loves using their torches to read the space stories and searching for the moon and stars that are stuck on the roof of the reading area. The children have also enjoyed creating scrunched up, tinfoil moon rocks and then using the pincers to search for the moon rocks inside the flour moon. The children have been doing a great job exploring the moon and Luke has had a great time using cups and pincers in the flour. The children have also enjoyed learning lots of new space songs. They are learning lots of new vocabulary and are beginning to remember and sing the songs independently. I have been particularly impressed with how well Kai has remembered the words to ‘eight planets’.

The KS1 children (Jordi, Joana, Thais, Marcel and Noa) have been working hard to help the older children to create our school magazine. Joana and Thais did a fantastic job when writing a list of all the children in the class. The children also did a fantastic job drawing a picture of each of their friends. Jordi was also very keen to draw a picture of Jo and I. The pictures look fantastic and Noa was particularly concentrated and carefully drew the specific features of each person in the class. The children have been working lots on label writing and they were all confident to draw and label their space pictures for the magazine.

In maths, the children have continued to create different number displays. They enjoyed creating a planet calendar for January; colouring in the different planets and sticking the ordinal numbers in the correct place on the calendar. The children also continued to work on matching number words to the correct numerals. They enjoyed creating new number flashcards and displaying them in the correct order in the maths area. The children have continued to practise counting down from 10-0, especially when singing our new rocket song. The children then used ‘multiple of 10’ rocket pictures. It was the first time the children had accessed multiples of 10 and they did a fantastic job of ordering the numbers from 10, up to 100. We will keep working on tens, within a range of different space maths activities. Unfortunately, Arlet was poorly this week and missed all of the fun activities. I hope she is feeling better and can join us again next week.

All of the children have been reading individually to Jo, using the Oxford Reading Tree scheme. The children did a great job of blending the sounds to read the words. Marcel was especially confident to use the sounds he knows when reading the words in the book. We will read a new book every week and will start to bring a book home to practise reading at home.

The KS2 children (Judit, Blanca, Sara, Sofia, Arnau and Tatiana) have also been working very hard to create the different sections of the magazine. I was very impressed with the introduction Arnau wrote, as he presented his writing beautifully and was very keen to finish the two-page introduction. Judit did a fantastic job finding and writing up a muffin recipe for our special beach treat. She did a great job of copying different pictures and illustrating each part of the recipe. Blanca did a great job, using the computer to find out information about the planetarium we are going to visit. She then translated the information from Catalan to English and dictated very well to Sofia, who wrote down the information and presented it beautifully for the magazine.

In maths, the children have continued to work on fractions. I have been particularly impressed with the progress Sara has made with fractions as she is now able to confidently find ½, ¼ and ¾ of different amounts and convert the ingredients in different recipes to ensure that she created the recipes for the correct amount of people. Judit also did a fantastic job of multiplying, and dividing fractions and she was extremely perseverant when working out the answers to create the fractions triangles. Arnau and Tatiana have worked really hard to draw pizzas and shade the correct number of pieces to ensure that they depicted the correct fraction for each flashcard.

All of the children have enjoyed reading individually to me. They all read fantastically well in English. It was great to see how engaged Arnau was with reading and how keen he was to read more than one book to me. Tatiana really impressed me with the comprehension skills she had and the abilities she had to explain the story to me in great detail. Blanca did a fantastic job of reading a chapter book to me. She was extremely motivated to understand all of the words within the book and she was keen for me to explain any words which she didn’t understand.

This week, we have started a new system of ‘happy faces’. The children have been very motivated and have worked really hard to get ten happy faces next to their name. All of the children who gained ten happy faces for listening carefully and completing their work were rewarded with a treat morning on Friday. The children had a great time baking muffins (using Judit’s recipe). They then ate the muffins, before choosing to play lots of team games, which involved them running, jumping and jogging around obstacles. The children had a fantastic time and are now all really motivated to get ten happy faces again next week.