Dorset

Week ending 21st January 2022

We’ve had another exciting week, involving a trip to the circus, well sort of!  Claude, the star of our text of the term Claude at the Circus by Alex T. Smith, went to the circus, and we used our imaginations to write about what we have seen at the circus.  It was completely thrilling to read about lions leaping through hoops of fire and the acrobats flying over the heads of bejewelled elephants.  This week the children also learned about superlatives in English and how to make them by adding the est suffix to words.  We can all agree, it was the greatest week in English, ever!

This week has seen us hone our addition skills and then use them to support the inverse as the children turned their hands to subtraction.  We were all so proud of them, as they applied all the methods they have learned and practised in the last few weeks, to something new – drawing number lines, 10 frames, bar models and using cubes and counters to help with their learning.

In R.E. this week, the children discussed the question of whether Christians believe the Good News of Jesus is only for “good” people and learned about Jesus’s friendship with Matthew the tax collector.  It was interesting to see that a lot of the children changed their opinion about who the Good News was for as the lesson progressed.

Exploration is the theme of our history lessons this term, and the children learned about Christopher Columbus and his trip to America.  We all thought it was very funny that he ended up in America by mistake because he was actually aiming to get to India.  The children used their story mapping skills to retell the story of his journey to America, bringing back never before seen goodies such as cacao and tomatoes.  We also have thought of our own historical questions to ask Columbus, his crew and the King and Queen of Spain!

There was an invasion of caterpillars this week in our science lessons!  Different colour caterpillars were hidden all around the outdoor area and the children had to find them.  We were interested to discover that the brightest colour ones were easy to find and the green and brown ones a lot harder.  This lead on to a really interesting discussion about camouflage and why different animals have it.