Target Treats

Great Bear Class have been working on listening well and taking turns to speak. We chose these targets from our skills tree. Each term the skills on our tree change and as the year progresses the skills build up to become more challenging, the number of skills varies from 6 to 8 and they cover subject areas as well as social skills and learning attitudes.

Each time Great Bear class show they have achieved the chosen skill they gain a star on our target board and when we reach five stars we can have a treat! This term the children chose cake, squash and a visit to the library, so easy to please, bless them!

They decorated their own cake and enjoyed them with squash and then we went to the library to enjoy some free reading time. Everyone had a great afternoon!

We will let you know what our next target is. Here are some photos of cake making and eating!

Latest Table of the Day groups

Here are our latest Table of the Day winners, who enjoyed a Autumn walk and collecting Autumn Treasure!

Homework Dinosaurs

One home work choice was to construct a dinosaur out of any material you choose. Here are two that have been brought in. Great Bear enjoyed asking the creators, Isabelle and James questions about how they made them.

Aglazing Dinosaurs!

Our first batch of glazed clay dinos are out of the kiln and they are fab! We used several different blues and greens to create the colours. We are going to put them on display when they are all fired and then the children will bring them home, please do find somewhere special to put them as we have put so much effort into them.

Clay Dinos-Round 2!

Great Bear's amazing clay dinos have had their first firing and are looking fab! Lots of children have seen the kiln and we having been discussing how glaze works, which will be our final step.

Here is some of the brilliant dinos, some complete with volcano backdrop.

More Table of the Day

Table of the Day is proving to be a big hit and supporting responsibility and independance in the classroom.

Here are Green and Purple table enjoying their treat in the Autumn sunshine, along with Pip, Great Bear's Hedgehog!

Huffing and Puffing.

As part of our Science topic we have been looking at our hearts, how they work and how how to keep them healthy.

We have been using an electronic pulse monitor on our finger to find our resting heart rate and our active heart rate. We had great fun, jumping and running to see if we could increase our heart rates. We drew pictures and made predictions about how our bodies and heart rates change after exercise.

Sorry for the wonky picture, I can't rotate it!

Does our egg breathe?

Great Bear Class were very intrigued to learn about animals that develop inside eggs. We were worried that our baby dinosaur couldn't breathe if covered up so we conducted an investigation to find out.

Here is what we did; we submurged 3 eggs in a mixture of water, blue food colouring and washing up liquid. We left them for and hour. We predicted that when we cracked the eggs open we would find that the eggs inside were blue because egg shells have tiny holes that allow the developing animal to breathe.

There was lots of amazing discussions about what might happen, what we discovered and the reasons why. We found that the inside of the eggshells were stained with tiny blue spots, showing that the eggs had absorbed the blue water through the tiny air holes. But the eggs themselves were not blue as we had thought they might be.A very interesting investigation, we all learnt lots, including the grown ups!

Dino Crazy!

This week we have really thrown ourselves into our dinosaur topic, even more than before!

We have been measuring with dinosaurs to find longer and shorter and also using a ruler to measure dinosaurs, which Great Bear were great at.

We have looked at two different ways to create clay dinosaurs and then created our own clay dinosaurs. We are going to fire and glaze them and have had interesting conversations about what a kiln is!

The pictures don't quite do them justice!

 

We also had an amazing discovery, we found a jar full of ... Well we had lots of ideas; tiny eggs, fossils, bones, dinosaur seeds and many more. So we thought about it and decided we might plant them to see what happens. The next day we found an egg where we had planted the seeds, everyone was very excited.

After lots more wondering and thinking, we created models of what we think was in the egg. We used our models to help to write creative, descriptive sentences about our ideas.

 

The egg is now safely wrapped up in a basket in the dinosaur role play area. But not completely covered as we were worried the egg couldn't breathe, which led to an investigation on, "Do animals breathe in eggs?" We have found a science investigation to help us learn more, so watch this space!
We are also worried that the egg might hatch when we are on half term as our reasearch has told us that eggs usually take 21 days to hatch but we will see!