Be sure to check back here on Monday 6th April for the final blog post before the Easter holiday. There will be lots of family fun for you to take part in including an Easter quiz and a picture Easter egg hunt. There will be 6 posts between 9-9.05am so make sure you scroll down to see them all.
In school we started to embark on our very own dinosaur research projects. Unfortunately we only got to the planning stages of our project. Why not carry on your research at home? You could use the field guide on Dinosaur Train to find out facts about your chosen dinosaur. Try and remember which dinosaur you and your group decided to focus on as part of your research. Use what you find to write your own fact sheet including how big your dinosaur was, what it ate and other interesting information. You could even create your own Top Trumps card or create a page for a non-fiction book based on your dinosaur. It could include labelled pictures and some captions of information. You could use an old shoe box and fill it with fun and interesting facts. Why not cut a piece of string the same size as your dinosaur to put in? You could make some salt dough food to represent what the dinosaur ate. Where in the world did your dinosaur live? Could you add in some sand if it lived in the desert or some leaves if it lived in the forest? Get as creative as you want with the information you find out. Work on this a much or as little as you want over the Easter holiday.
Check out this page to read some interesting and fun dinosaur facts The Dinosaur Museum
We started to talk about doubles in school and used dominoes to explore doubles and not doubles. Listen to the Doubles Rap (1-5) to warm up your maths brains Double Rap. If you have your own set of dominoes at home, have a game with your family. Be sure to check the learning pack for more fun ideas to practise doubling. Use a mirror to double or a see the picture below for ways to get creative. You can use a muffin tin and anything small to help with the calculations. If you have any dice at home ask your child how to play DOUBLE BUBBLE! (You both roll a dice, so you’ll need two, and if you land on the same amount of dots you shout ‘DOUBLE BUBBLE’ and then call out what the double calculation is).
Dinosaur Discovery on BBC Bitesize is a great game for learning lots about dinosaurs. Collect the stickers as you complete each activity. The Diplodocus activity talks about measuring footprints and recording them on a chart. Measure the footprints of people in your family and record these on your own chart. Think about different units for measuring such as tape measures, rulers, lining up pegs, pennies or spare buttons. Use whatever you can find. Who has the biggest and smallest feet? What else could you measure? Can you do some of your own research and find out how big your favourite dinosaur was?
Dinosaur Discovery BBC Bitesize
Keep practising your tricky words. Use the home learning pack to help you to write them down, get somebody in your family to hide them and then go on a tricky word hunt! You must have a go at reading them before you can collect them up. For an extra challenge, look at the word, cover it and write it. Check to see if you got it correct. Here’s a couple of our tricky word songs to get you started…
Tricky Words and Sight Words Song
Phase 3 Tricky Word Song Say Hello To
“Hello to all our new little friends at Damers.
Ruby and I hope you are keeping safe and well. We are very sad that we can’t come to see you for a while and listen to you read.
Instead we will send you a little blog telling you what we have been doing. We hope you are still continuing with your reading because you were all getting so good and we both loved listening to your stories. I think we will both be amazed at how much better your reading has got when we come to see you next. Ruby especially liked all the fuss and treats you gave her.
Ruby has been going for a walk every day and playing with her toy in the garden. We miss you all so much and cannot wait to see you again and hear what you have been doing.
Do you recognise where Ruby is in the pictures. She looks very comfortable, doesn’t she.
We will send you some more pictures soon.
Keep up the good reading.
From Ruby your PAT dog and Mary xx”
PE Day. As it’s our PE day why not try a homemade obstacle course. See how creative you can get! Think about travelling low, crawling, sliding on your bellies, hopping, lifting your legs up high, stretching your arms. Warm up with some star jumps, the jelly bean game and balancing on one leg. Also don’t forget to check out the home learning packs. There’s loads of ideas about throwing and catching using different objects.
Good morning everybody! I hope that you’ve all had a restful weekend and that you enjoyed our Celebration Assembly on Friday. This week we are going to think about Health and Wellbeing and the effect that nature has on our lives. I’m hoping that we will all become ‘Transformers’ through growing and gardening.
Your grown-ups have an email to help with the assembly and in this week’s notes I’ve included a clip for them that some of us watched together in school, linked with The Eden Project and the work of Sir Tim Smit. You may want to watch this together as a reminder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8unx8-pZxg
Those of you who met Sir Tim when he came to visit will remember his advice to you about dreaming big and how if we all join together we can transform places through hope and nature. So that is exactly what we are going to do this week!
I would like you to think about a space in your home, or your garden if you have one, that you would like to transform over the coming weeks by planting some seeds or caring for plants. Some of you may already have seeds and spaces that you have started to transform, but don’t worry if you haven’t as we can help and I have let your grown-ups know what we can do.
I would like you to take a ‘before’ snapshot of the space (this can be a photograph or a drawing) and we’ll then look at this again in a few weeks’ time once things start to grow. If Sir Tim had done this at the beginning of his project this would have been his ‘before’ and ‘after’ …
As most of you are now able to stay home and stay safe, I thought it would also be good this week to take a little virtual trip over the Atlantic to New York City to see another beautiful transformation project. The High Line is a public park built on a historic railway line which runs above the streets of Manhattan. It was saved from demolition by neighborhood residents and opened in 2009 as a beautiful public space where visitors can enjoy nature, art, and design.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTxx1VTyUv8&feature=youtu.be
The High Line is supported by a team of dedicated volunteers. There’s a lovely clip below showing one of these volunteers, Gammy Miller, in action. I wonder if you can find any links between interdependence and wellbeing and what Gammy is doing within her community?
So your mission this week, should you choose to accept it, is to start your own natural ‘transformation’ through growing and gardening. Your starting point may look like this …
… and if you ‘dream big’, who knows what your ‘after’ will look like!
Lots of you have already been telling me about the changes in nature that you can see all around you and I would love to see your pictures and drawings of the natural things that are making us all say ‘wow!’ at the moment too, now that we genuinely have time to ‘stand and stare’.
I can’t wait to hear from you (your grown-up will help you to share pictures, drawings and ‘wow’ moments with me). I will reply to any messages that come in and I will share all the highlights in our celebration on Friday.
Stay sheltered, safe, healthy and happy Team Damers. School is very empty without you.
Mrs Smith ☺️
I hope you all had a lovely weekend, don’t forget to let me know what you have been up to by either writing a comment on the blog or uploading a comment, picture or video on EExAT. It brightens my day to see all your faces and the amazing things you have been doing at home.
In our art sessions we’ve been looking at the artist Kandinsky. We’ve mostly focused on his circle art work. Let’s get creative! Go on a circle hunt inside and outside your house (if possible). How many different naturally occurring circles can you find? Take photos of them, draw them or create rubbings. Discuss if all of these circles are 2D shapes or are they actually a face of a cylinder?
Take a look at some of these circles in nature. Have a chat with your family about where these circles are or occur. Can you think of any more natural circles?
