This term we will learn about Victorian schools, by looking at artefacts, diary entries and  photos from the past.

We started our topic 'Gruel and School' by reading and following instructions to make gruel. The children then wrote  a food review and scored their gruel out of five stars. Surprisingly, some children gobbled it all up and awarded their gruel a top score of five stars!

We then designed a bowl of tasty porridge and used skills such as chopping, whisking and grating to create their recipes. The children demonstrated fantastic team work and our school values of 'love' and 'friendship' to help their peers.

We introduced the story of 'The magic porridge pot' and we have hot seated the characters and asked them questions about their day. We found an Oxford reading tree book with another version of this story, and this has become a popular choice of book for children to read independently. We separated the story into the beginning, middle and end and talked about the problem and solution in this tale. The children sequenced the story in pairs and used the pictures to retell the story. We made a class story map, focusing on the beginning of the story as this is the part they will write this term. The children were fantastic at suggesting actions and pictures to draw to represent words in the story. The children have now created their own story maps  and have been using these to retell the beginning of the story. 

We will innovate the traditional tale of 'The magic porridge pot' with the children choosing their characters and choosing what the girl / boy was doing that morning before they were given the magic pot.  

As part of Science week, the children experienced the planetarium and asked Scientist Helen about the dust on the moon and what aliens look like. They learnt that planets orbit the sun, and some planets have rings around them. They learnt that the planets furthest from the sun were the coldest planets. 

We posed a  question, and investigated it. Our question was:

Which material works best to make a parachute for the landing module?

The children made parachutes from fabric, plastic and paper and we discussed which ones worked best. One child noticed that the larger parachutes worked best. Another child noticed that the parachutes with lighter weights seemed to "fly slower". We concluded that all these materials worked well, but the paper parachutes could get "wet and soggy".

In Maths we have recapped number bonds to ten. We have been practising our daily KIRFs of counting to 100 using a one hundred square, and counting forwards and backwards from different given numbers. Sometimes our Cheeky Monkey toy takes a number or two, and we need to work out which numbers are missing! We are also counting in tens, ensuring we say the 'ty' sound at the end e.g twen-ty, thir-ty. We call them 'cup of tea' numbers to help the children remember this. We continue to work on our numbersense and try our best to apply our knowledge to addition and subtraction. Our common questions are "What we we already know?" "How can we use / apply this?" We will also focus on place value of two-digit numbers this term and through into next term, knowing that 32 is made up of 3 tens and 2 'ones'.