Children in need

Last week we found out about Children In Need. We learnt about Pudsey bear and how he helps children who are less fortunate than ourselves by encouraging people to raise money.

We decided that we could help raise money by making things to sell. 

Pudsey bear ears - adding 1 more/less than spots onto the ears.

Then printing a band to add the ears onto.

 We made cakes using the balances, using an egg as a weight and balancing the ingredients against it before cracking the egg.

Making biscuits using different Numicon weights.

And decorating these with icing and spots!

Making Pudsey bookmarks

We made signs to show the things we had to sell.

And we managed to raise an amazing £66.46!! Well done Cherry class and your families. Your hard work paid off and will go a long way to helping Children In Need.

We also enjoyed a range of bear themed activities.

Making Pudsey bear yellow playdough

Bonfire night

We have enjoyed finding out about Bonfire night and the children were very interested to hear about Guy Fawkes and his plot to blow up the Houses of Parliment.

We thought lots about fireworks and explosions.

Fireworks 'zooming' through hoops in the tree!

And noticing you can make a diamond shape when you hold the two ends of the rocket together!

Making rockets with 2D shapes

And building rockets with the cubes then counting back from 10-0, ready to 'blast off'!!

Making spinning Catherine wheels using the salad spinner.

And writing firework words.

We finished off the week with building our very own exploding volcano, building on children's own interests...

We mixed cream of tartar, red food colouring, washing up liquid and vinegar together and ta-da, our very own volcano erupted! We were all very surprised!!!

When the 'lava' stopped flowing, the children wanted more so we added a few more of the ingredients and it carried on!

This is a small snapshot of last weeks exciting learning due to an iPad which could only take limited photos due to being full! It has now been 'emptied' ready to fill up on more lovely experiences.... Watch this space...

Autumn walk

We went for an Autumn walk around the school grounds, observing the changes around us.

 We noticed that the leaves had changed colour and found green, yellow, orange, brown and red leaves on different trees.

We collected the leaves that had fallen on the ground to take back to use in class.

We found that during Autumn there are berries and apples growing on the trees.

We collected the fallen apples to use for a variety of activities.

Counting and matching.

Weighing...

Floating/sinking fun...

Ordering numbered apples.

We thought about the Autumn colours we saw in the fruits and leaves and then explored colours making our own Autumn trees.

We selected one of the Autumn colours and painted this on one of our hands. We printed this onto our tree to represent the leaves. We then chose a different Autumn colour and painted this onto the other hand and again printed this onto the tree. The children then rubbed their hands together to mix the two colours, predicting beforehand what colour it might make. The children were both surprised and excited that they had managed to create a new colour by mixing two different colours together. They then printed this 'new' colour onto their tree.

We  added our pictures of our families onto our Autumn trees.

We have been using Autumn objects to explore weight. We have used balances to investigate heavier, lighter and objects that balance. One big misconception is that the bigger the object, the heavier it will be. I gave the children a challenge to test this. There were 3 different size boxes, each containing an Autumn object. The boxes were all wrapped in white paper and the children could first estimate which was the heaviest/lightest and then were able to pick up each box to check their ideas. I encouraged the children to draw/write what they thought was inside each box. On Friday we opened the boxes and the children were really surprised. In the biggest box I had placed the lightest object ( a leaf) and in the smallest box I had placed the heaviest object(an apple).