Room 26's Class Blog

 Today was our first day having swimming lessons for the year. We will have 2 weeks now, and another couple of weeks later in the year.   Fingers crossed there are no extra lockdowns that stop us from swimming this year, and that we remember to bring our togs each day.

 To get our ideas clear on how the Moon orbits Earth, while Earth orbits the Sun, we have tried to visualise it in a number of ways.   At times we have watched some of our classmates acting out and dancing orbits around the person acting as the Sun standing in the centre of the class.  We have also watched a classmate holding a Globe, while another person is trying to spin it, while they both walk around another person pretending to be the Sun. Finally we made our own models that showed the Moon and Earth orbiting around the Sun. For some of us, this was also new having to use split pins that meant our planet could go around in circles.  We had lots of help from each other to make these, which was really great.

 There is much excitement in Room 26 with a Solar System jigsaw puzzle underway. At different times of the day, a few extra pieces are added, but with 500 pieces to sort through, it may take a bit longer before we can show the finished picture.  Great way of helping us visualise the planets in the Solar System that we have been finding out about. Maths has also been very hands on.  We are using centimetre cubes, 10 centimetre cube strips and 100 centimetre cube blocks to fill container spaces.  This is really helping us see what the capacity of containers are.  Our challenge for the end of the week was to see how big a 1 meter cube was - we're still working on the idea of this to work out the capacity of our class.  Getting the floor surface is slightly easier, but having to work out the height of our class is   something else.   

 It has been a busy few weeks, not helped by the changing class numbers as families isolate.  We have had the chance though to review the 5Ws and H, work on extending a sentence to give it more detail for our readers, and now naming the parts in a sentence that actually provides the detail - verb/adverbs and nouns/adjectives. For art we have been mastering our scissor skills to create artwork using both positive and negative space: the art medium of Notan. And even in maths, working on our number skills; reading and understanding maths word problems; while also recognising how making models both out of equipment or in drawings can help us solidify and prove our ideas to solve the question. Lastly, it has been taking us some time to settle into what to do independently during our Daily 5 Reading programme.  Fingers crossed for being ready to work on this so that others can start their group reading. What we've been up to   and pingpong toss click on these video links...