Summer Week 5: Goodbye Mr Garbutt!

 Hello Class 2 Parents,

I hope you have all had a good week and enjoyed the rain - our trees at Forest School were happy!

Today we say 'goodbye' to Mr Garbutt, who has completed his seven-week placement with us. The children have made him a lovely card with messages in. We are going to miss his science lessons (he's taught the children so much about habitats around the world), his fantastic voices when reading stories and his kindness to the children. 

This week:

In maths with Mr Garbutt:
 Year 1 continued their work on arrays and Year 2 finished their unit of work on fractions. 

To practice at home, Year 1 can make arrays using anything you like (an array has equal rows and columns, like this:

The Year 2 children can practice finding one half, one quarter, three quarters and two quarters of fruit and vegetables with you (recognising that two quarters is equal to one half).

In phonics Year 1 have been practising alien and real word reading - this will be a bit of a theme for the next couple of week!

Here is another QR code to get some practice in - let me know if you have any problems with it!

In spellings the Year 2 children have started to learn about apostrophes for contraction - for example,  didn't, I'll, we're, you're, you've. 

To practice this, they can play 'Egg Hunt'. 

In our story this week the children started tracking their turtles using a world map. They found their turtles on the turtle tracker and have started logging which ocean they are in, and in which compass direction they are heading. At the moment, we have turtles heading north, east and south towards Asia, Australasia and Antarctica. We will keep you posted. 

The Turtle Detectives alsow ent diving in the shallow waters around Honu Island, to find out whether they were a suitable habitat for green turtles. They found seagrass and algae - a green turtle's main diet - so they decided that the habitat was very well suited to green turtles. They are going to keep investigating to find out why the turtles aren't currently coming to Honu Island. 

Forest School this week:

The children enjoyed a bit of mud this week. They did some cave painting using fingers, sticks, mud, charcoal and water. A group of children also dug a hole before filling it with water - it went from being a puddle, to being muddy soup, to being sticky mud. The children were fascinated by the changes that occurred. Eventually Oscar asked whether the mud would dry in the sun, so the children created a mud creature and we are going to see what happens to it next. It just so happened that some carrots and tomatoes had fallen on the floor and couldn't be eaten, so the children used them to add to their mud creature. 

A group of children also carried out some essential fire pit maintenance by cutting the grass with scissors - a very therapeutic exercise. 

I hope you all have a good weekend,

Mrs Simpson