Trip to the science museum

This week, the early years children have been learning how to listen for the initial sound in words and to write this sound with Anthony. Some of our early years children are now able to read simple cvc words and some are able to sound out and write them! In Years 1 and 2 we have been consolidating our knowledge of phase 3 and 4 phonics and have begun to learn phase 5 sounds which consist of alternative ways of writing sounds that we already know (eg oi and oy / ee and ea). In Maths, the Year 1 and 2s have been practising time, learning ordinal numbers and how to write them (1st, 2nd / first, second). They have also been learning how to read, write and order days and months as part of our unit on time. We have been learning all about electricity this week in preparation for our trip to the museum which we went to at the end of the week. We learnt about materials that conduct electricity by doing an experiment with Markus and Anthony and we also learnt about how to be safe around electricity and produced posters to show the parents at our next presentation.

The older children learned more about the properties of triangles, including angles. We looked at how to construct triangles with rulers and protractors by following precise written instructions, as well as how to find the value of missing angles of triangles. In English, we focused on how to add prefixes and suffixes to root words in order to change the word's meaning, for e.g. Changing the root word Nation by adding the prefix Inter and the suffix Al to make International. This culminated in the creation of a prefix-suffix tree that we now have proudly displayed in our classroom. In Science, we looked at electricity through a range of theory and practical experiments. We discovered that distilled water cannot act as a conductor of electricity, but if you mix the water with salt it creates enough electrons to cause electricity to flow in a circuit.