Positive and negative numbers

This week, the younger children welcomed a new member of the class: Carla! Lots of children already knew her from last year and so were very excited to have her back in their class. She has settled well into school and is a welcome addition to the school. 

In English, we continued learning about Goldilocks, describing characters from the story, listening carefully to the story and completing a checklist when we heard words such as 'porridge', 'mummy bear' and 'small chair'. The week culminated in a trip to the park with our teddies for a teddy bear's picnic. 

In Maths, we have been learning to count in twos. This is a useful skill because it means we can count items much quicker! We did this using conkers, the squares outside (in a game of What's the Time Mr Wolf?), completing number sequences and lots of repetition! Next week, we will focus on number bonds to 10. Some of the older children will begin looking at how to partition numbers (for example 23 is 20 and 3). 

We have been learning about minibeasts all week so on Friday, we teamed up with the older children to make some paper mache minibeasts! So far, we have one layer of paper mache complete (despite a few popped balloons!) and are ready for the next layer on Monday. We can't wait to hang our creepy crawlies in the corridor for everyone to see!

The older children began an exciting unit of Report Writing in Literacy. We planned non-chronological reports on topics of our choice before typing them up on our laptops. We also looked at the features of Newspaper Reports in preparation for writing our own news stories next week. 

In Maths, we have been getting our heads around negative numbers and how to solve equations involving both positive and negative numbers. We also deepened our understanding of this (as well as our reading skills) by solving word problems involving negative numbers.