Giant Watercolour Paintings

In Art we have been thinking about perspective and how objects look bigger if they are closer to you. Mrs Dummett drew a triangle on our watercolour paper to help us draw our giant and we looked at examples to help. But all the creative ideas were our own, we had smiling giants. surprised giants and angry giants. Don't they look great?

Amazing Alternative Jack Stories

This week we have been planning and writing alternative Jack and the Beanstalk stories. We have read different versions, hot seated characters, written letters and much more to support us with creating new ideas.

We drew story maps to plan our stories and then wrote them, we wrote for 45 minutes!

They are amazing and I am so proud of all of Great Bear Class and the progress they show, we will read some extracts during our Class Assembly on 12th February at 2.30pm.

Lots of Visitors on Family Learning Morning

We had a house full on Family Learning morning! Great Bear Class were showing their families how brilliant our Phonics learning is and the different kinds of challenging activities we use to help consolidate our phonics understanding.

Here are some photos of us hard at work with our families!

Giant Alarms

We have been continuing to develop our alarm designs for the giant. We have been creating pressure switches for Jack to step on and alert the giant. We have used paper clips and aluminium foil, we had lots of fun and discovered that electricity cannot travel through air.

We have been learning, honest!

This week has been as busy as ever, however I haven't taken as many photos as I usually do!

Here are some of the things we have done:

Written about what we would buy with magic beans.

Role played and wrote about how the Giant's Wife and Jack's Mother feel about Jack.

Started watercolour perspective paintings of the Giant.

Carried on with our contemporary dance about growing.

Practised counting forwards and backwards in 10s and 5s.

Started to plant our runner bean plants that have germinated on our window.

Learnt, discussed, thought, shared, played and laughed together! Because we are Bright.

Jack's Parachute

This week in Science we have been thinking about ways in which Jack could get down the beanstalk quicker and Great Bear class decided on a parachute. So we have been investigating the best materials for a parachute. The children had lots of great discussions about size and shape of the parachute and which materials to use. We also thought about how fast we wanted Jack to fall, too quickly and he might be hurt, too slow and the Giant might catch him!

We used tissue paper, plastic bags and sugar paper to make the parachutes. We spent a long time discussing how to make this a fair test so we didn't change the shape of the parachute, this time! The figures used, the size and shape of the paper, the amount of string used and the height Jack was dropped from was all kept the same.

Despite our predictions, the sugar paper was the best. We conclude that this was because the figures were too heavy for the other materials and next time we need to use smaller, lighter Jacks.

However we did have amazing discussions about gravity which led to space, rockets, planets and the moon. Is this a potential topic?

Shape Construction

This week in Numeracy we have been looking at 2D and 3D shapes, recognising, naming and discussing their properties. We also added a new shape to our list, the Rhombus.

We used a variety of sticks and modelling clay to create 2D and 3D shapes and counted their sides and corners or vertices as we have been trying to call them.

The children built brilliant models and tried to explore building some of the more challenging shapes.

Apologies for the sideways photos, the computer will not let me turn them today.