Spring Term Learning
This term Owls will be investigating Amazing Places and Spaces!
Owls have kicked off their Amazing Places and Spaces topic by starting to look at buildings and architecture. We have explored our school, recording the materials of the walls, windows, floors and doors. We became explorers in our PE session, using movement of our bodies in response to music to explore and imagine a place, taking inspiration from this in our writing. We developed our understanding of adjectives to write a descriptive story setting for our imaginary place. Year 2 pupils started to use a thesaurus to extend their vocabulary of adjectives.
Our class text this half term which we are studying in our English work is Man on the Moon (A Day in the Life of Bob).
A surprising incident occurred in Brooke this morning (17th March). We will investigate and let you know more...
On Tuesday 3rd March, Owls designed and made some items that Bob may sell on his stall - souvenirs from space!
Friday 28th February, the children produced some fantastic work in response to our understanding of the text so far. After carrying out role play activities, the children created and wrote postcards to send home from their own trip to the Moon.
During the week beginning Monday 24th February, Owls have been deepening their understanding of the Moon through scientific enquiry. We first learnt about Neil Armstrong and his mission to the moon. This prompted us to start to think about what the moon looked like and how it got it's texture - contrary to popular rumour, we discovered that it was not made from cheese! We used flour in round pots to represent the moon's surface. We dropped pebbles into the flour to imitate space rocks and meteorites flying through space which hit the moon. There were some fantastic patterns created which show how the moons surface has become covered in craters.
We investigated different materials to test their properties. The class discovered that some of the materials could make light and some could reflect light. This linked in with our learning of the Moon, as a reflector and not a light source in itself.
Our learning then continued to think about the Moon's phases. We used torches to investigate the effects of light shined onto an object. Isaac discovered and was able to demonstrate to the class that when we shine a light onto a round object, that there is a dark side where the light does not touch. Lastly, we solidified this learning by icing biscuits to show the different phases of the Moon.
On Thursday 13th February we had an inspiring shared experience during our now>press>play demo. We visited the NASA Space Station in Florida and accidentally ended up in a rocket travelling towards Mars! The children each had a set of wireless headphones so that they were individually able to follow along and listen to the story.
The children subsequently shared verbally some fantastic insight as to how it felt to travel up into space through their drama and role play.
I must say it was very strange to see a completely silent room, with all of the children acting out the story. I think it was a great way to move along our topic from buildings to Space.
Owl class visited Norwich Cathedral on Thursday 23rd January. We had an incredible day and learned a lot! You can find photos from the day here.
We have been learning coding through Scratch blocks this half term. We first experimented using a variety of motion and event blocks to instruct a sprite to move around and explore an amazing place or space.
As our learning progressed, we used this knowledge to create a game of catch - where one sprite had to catch another. The class have really enjoyed the challenges!
Olive and Jessica's explanation of their working code.
A close up of the action!
Owl and Robin class took a trip to the wishing woods in early January! We explored and investigated materials around the woodland which could be used to make a house for The Gingerbread Man. Check out the amazing places which we have created!
We have been building on more of our topic learning at the Wishing Woods throughout this half term. We became heroes to defend our castle from a terrifying dragon.
We used chalk to draw on the trees to create our dragons. There were some fantastic designs of scaly creatures wrapped around trees. We used sticks to create our castle floor plans, thinking about the rooms we may have needed in our castle. Finally, we created catapults from sticks to launch pine cones, in a bid to defend our castles and defeat the dragons!
