Animal Poetry

Great Bear Class never fail to amaze me with what they are able to do. This week we have been looking at poetry in Literacy based on British Wildlife, we used photographs and examples written by other children.

The first set of poems we read were written using words starting with the first letter of the animal's name. The children worked with their learning partners to choose and animal and come up with the words. We then discussed the styles in which you could write the poems.

Here are some examples.

S Is For Squirrel   By James and Casimira

Squirrel, soft, shy, scared, speedy, skidding.
Squirrel living in a tree.
Squirrel eating nuts.
Squirrel being cheeky.
Squirrel!

 R Is For Robin By Thomas W and Erin

Robin, their feathers are red.
Robin, the trees are a good place to roost.
Robin, they rush and rub past you.
Robin, the roofs are a quiet place to nest.

Next week we are decorating our poems and writing question poems, we will share more of our wonderful work with you then!

Outdoor Ordering

We have been outside lots in the beautiful sunshine. Numeracy is a perfect learning area to take outside as there is so much we can do. This week we have been ordering numbers to 100 using number tiles, digit cards and dice.

Building Learning Power

You may have heard your little person talking to you about resilience and being a resilient learner this week. This is part of a whole school initiative to "build learning power" taken from Professor Guy Claxon.

We are looking at the learning powers, resilience, relationships, resourcefulness and responsibility. Each power is represented by a colour and we have glass stones to represent them. The colours are; red, purple, clear and blue. The children are encouraged to put a stone in the matching jar when they feel they have used that learning power or indeed the class has collectively! We then discuss the jars at the end of the week as to our most/least successful learning power and our next steps.

At the moment I am introducing one power a week to build up to the full 4. We have started on resilience and are on to relationships next. We have been using short film clips, songs and discussions to introduce and understand what each learning power means.

If you would like to find our more here is a link to Guy Claxton's website.
http://www.buildinglearningpower.com/about/professor-guy-claxton/

What is Wisdom?

This term we are thinking about and reflecting on wisdom in Collective Worship. On a Thursday morning we worship together as a class in our own classroom, the children have lots of wonderful, insightful thoughts and comments and it is a lovely time for us all to enjoy just being together.

Here we are thinking about what present we would ask for if God said we could have any present we liked. This is linked to the Bible story of Solomon.

Outdoor Numeracy in the Sunshine!

Great Bear class just love being able to go outside to learn at the drop of a hat! This week we were looking at Number in Numeracy, this area of learning is all about, reading, writing, counting, ordering and reasoning about numbers, their value and size.

We went of a hunt for jigsaw pieces, the children worked with their learning partners to find a number jigsaw made up from a digit, word, picture and numacon shape. We then discussed our learning, we all agreed that we were very good at matching digit and word but need to work on our counting as pictures were miscounted so was the numacon. We decided these are areas for us to work on!

Here we are hunting in the sun and with our finished jigsaws.

Princess Testing Machines!

During our Hans Christian Anderson topic we have used the story "The Princess and the Pea" to stimulate creative ideas in Literacy a lot. We have designed and labelled princess testing machines, wrote instructions on how to use the machine and designed persuasive adverts to sell our machines.

Great Bear worked very hard and had lots of fantastic creative ideas and worked so very hard in Literacy, producing excellent quality work that makes me very proud of Great Bear and their super work!

To finish our topic, the children chose small groups to work in and created their own models of princess testing machines. All the children collaborated brilliantly together, sharing ideas, compromising and having lots of fun. Each group explained how their machine works with everyone talking and answering our questions in each group, which is great as we do have some quiet people in Great Bear sometimes! It was a lovely way to finish our topic and term.

Easter Bonnets!

There was an amazing array of Easter Bonnets on our lasy day of Spring term. Here they are, with photos of us braving the wind to display them to the school on the play ground.

Thank you for all your hard work, Great Bear looked brilliant!