Comets, asteroids and alliens

This week we welcomed another new friend into the class. Julien has enjoyed settling into our class routines and making friends with the other children in the class.

This week was our final week learning about space. The EYFS children (Sergi, Luke, Kai, Ona and Julien) have enjoyed spending the final week focusing on stars. They have been practising writing their names and focusing on the formation of each letter. I was very proud of Kai and the concentration he showed when writing his name and creating his name star. The children also did a great job painting their own stars by painting two triangles. Sergi was particularly concentrated and he worked hard to try and improve the star that he was painting and by the end he was confident to correctly paint the star shape by painting two triangles in the correct shape. The children have also been focused when continuing to extend their space vocabulary, using the space flashcards. Ona did a great job colouring in the planet pictures and I was impressed to see that she was able to follow my instructions and correctly select the colour I suggested for each of the planets. When organising the flashcards within our space display, I was impressed to see how engaged and keen Luke was to help me and it was great to see how much confidence he has developed when cutting out the flashcards; carefully cutting along the lines.

The KS1 children (Jordi, Carla, Joana, Thais, Marcel, Noa and Arlet) have been working hard on their story writing skills this week. The children each chose a space picture and then as a group the children discussed what they thought was happening in the picture, who might be there and what they thought the people might be doing in Space. The children then wrote simple sentences to explain the picture; beginning to create their own story ideas. Jo was very impressed with Arlet as she is becoming very independent when writing and is really developing the confidence to sound out her words and use the sounds she knows to write the words. Jo also explained how proud she was of Joanna as she is now grasping a great understanding of English and is keen to translate to her friends when helping them to think of story ideas. The children have also been working on descriptive Words, whereby they created their own planet and needed to use descriptive words to explain what their planet looks like and the things which we can see on their planet. It was lovely to see  how keen Thais was to explain that both she and Joana needed to live together on her planet. In maths, the children have continued with addition and have been focusing on their number bonds to 10. The children needed to complete the number sentences by working out how many they needed to add to equal ten altogether. Jordi and Marcel did a fantastic job of completing the number sentences and Jo was really impressed that they were able to answer some of the questions independently, without the use of props to help them. The children have also been practising their number bonds to 10 by colouring in different aliens in different colours and then deciding how many of each coloured alien could fit in the ten seats in the space ship. Carla was very motivated by the practical aspect of this activity and was keen to find lots of different ways of making 10. Noa also really enjoyed this activity. She took great when colouring the aliens and she was keen to check that she had correctly coloured ten aliens in each of her chosen colours.

The KS2 children (Sara, Judit, Arnau, Tatiana, Blanca and Sofia) have been working on list writing. The children really enjoyed using a numbered list to show the things they would take if they were leaving to go on a trip into space. It was so funny to read the ideas the children had of what was important to take into space. Blanca wrote a very extensive list of all hair products and make-up that she thought were vital items to take into space. Gabrielle was very impressed by how keen Arnau was to complete the list. He did a great job of numbering his ideas and he thought carefully about the importance of a space manual, whilst also being keen to explain that he needed to take lots of magdalenas into space, in case he got hungry. The children also worked on bullet point lists when writing an application to Nata; explaining the reasons why they would make a good astronaut. Sofia really thought about the skills she could bring to the job and she was very keen to explain how she wanted to start creating life on Mars by planting lots of plants.  In maths this week we have been learning about doubling and halving. It is great to see how motivated the children have been by this mathematical concept. Tatiana has developed a very effective to work out the doubles of bigger numbers. She is now able to independently apply her arrow method as a way to break down and simplify the bigger numbers when working out the doubles of the numbers. Sara has really impressed me by how quickly she grasped the concept of doubling and she was extremely keen each day to be provided with extension work. Each day she was keen to tackle progressively more difficult work and I was so proud of how determined she was to complete the work and find out the answers. In our reading comprehension task the children needed to read an information text about comets and asteroids and then answer questions to show their understanding of what they had read. Judit really impressed me with the knowledge she gained from the text and it was lovely to see how confident she was to explain what she had learnt.

It was great to see some of you at the school’s open morning today and to see how proud the children were to show the school to their families.

Next week we start our new topic- 'the human body'. I look forward to seeing you all on Monday.