The Class 2 Blog: Autumn Week 6: Open morning and other things.

Hello Class 2 Parents,

Firstly, it was lovely to see so many of you on Wednesday morning for our open maths morning. I hope you enjoyed spending time with your children at school and seeing the sort of thing we get up to. Please don't worry if you couldn't make it - all of the children had a great time and there were plenty of adults to go around!

This week in Class 2...

In Maths:
The Year 1 children have been comparing numbers using 'more than', 'fewer than' and 'equal to'. The best way to practise this is in everyday language - particularly the phras 'fewer than' which is correct mathematically but that we rarely use. Encourage your child to use whole sentences eg 'I've got fewer sweets than my brother'. You could also play a card game, where two people draw a card, your child says eg 'I have fewer than you' or 'I have more than you' and the player with more gets to keep the two cards.

The Year 2 children have continued their work on number lines. In class they have enjoyed using a large number line with 10 intervals, and guessing where different numbers go. You could do this at home, using a large piece of paper, or chalking a number line on a pavement somewhere. The aim is for children to identify which two multiples of 10 a number comes between (eg 43 comes between 40 and 50) and also whether it is in the middle, or nearer the smaller or larger multiple of 10. You can also play last wee k's game again. A couple of you mentioned having a prompt to log in to it - using it on a laptop you should not need to, just click on the link and scroll down to this image of the game to play it, or scan the QR code to play it on a mobile device - again just scroll down to the image of the game. If you continue to have problems, please pop in to see me after school one day and I'll see whether I can help.

In phonics we have revisited ow, oi and ur and learnt to spell the word 'said'.

In spellings we have been looking at words beginning with 'kn' and 'gn'. The list has been added to The Spelling Shed!

In our story the children received a reply from Ernest, saying that while he had accepted that Bruno was a bear and not a dog, he really wanted to keep him. The bear keepers helped out by outlining the bear's needs (such as how much water he would need, what sort of food, and the habitat he was used to). Unfortunately, Ernest decided following this that he was unable to care for Bruno in the way that a sun bear needed, so Bruno has joined our bear sanctuary. This brings our total number of bears to five. The children carried out some health checks on the bears (checking teeth, vaccinations, weighing) and unfortunatley discovered that one bear had some serious injuries, suggesting they had been fighting. A decision was made to separate the bears, as it turns out bears are generally solitary creatures, so our Bear Santuary is in the process of being redesigned to ensure there are suitable enclosures for each of the bears based upon their different needs.

Forest School...
was blustery! We had a really lovely, sunny and blustery autumnal morning. Some of the children made some bird kites and enjoyed running around in the wind with them! Other children particularly enjoyed the barrels this week, standing and balancing on them, listening to the sounds they made when hit with different sticks, and spotting things from high up.