Time can be measured using many different items like calendars, analogue clocks, digital clocks, stop watches, sand timers or simply by counting. Have a look at what items you have in your house to help measure and tell the time.
Use a stopwatch or timer to record how fast you can run/ scoot/ cycle from one end of your garden to the other or choose a set distance in the park. Can you try again but try to do it even faster? Compare your times and discuss how the numbers got less if you were faster or more if you were slower.
Set yourself a one minute challenge…
How many star jumps can you do in 1 minute?
How many tricky bugs can you write down in 1 minute?
Can you tidy away all your toys in 1 minute? We use a countdown at school for tidy up time!
Keeping healthy includes keeping ourselves clean and keeping the germs away. I am sure you have seen lots of information and songs to use to ensure you wash your hands for 20 seconds. Count out loud or use a countdown timer to check you are washing for long enough. Brushing your teeth can be another daily routine to time – 2 minutes, morning and bedtime!
Getting enough sleep is also very important for keeping healthy. Why does sleep help your body?
Talk about what time you go to bed (to the nearest hour) and what time you wake up. How many hours do you sleep for? What do the hands look like on the clock at these times? Which numbers are they pointing to?
Listen and watch this story about what the hens get up to each hour of the day.
Read Miss Hudson’s daily food diary. Use your phonics to read each sentence as independently as you can. The tricky words are in red so remember not to sound those out. Fill in the missing part of the sentence by saying out loud what you see in the pictures.
Literacy
We would love to know about what has made you happy during lockdown. You could write about your favourite meals or snacks, your daily exercise, games you’ve played, your home learning, films you’ve seen and more. Draw a picture of yourself in the middle of a piece of paper and fill up the paper all around your picture with thought bubbles or speech bubbles and write what you’ve enjoyed the most.
Fun snacks
Plan to make some fun and healthy snacks this week. Work together to look through your cupboards and the fridge to see how creative you can get. Plan together by talking lots about what you’re going to do, what you can use and how you’re going to make them. Let your child lead the discussions by asking them lots of questions that start with how, where, when and getting them to expand on their ideas. The pictures below are for inspiration but create whatever you like.
Owl rice cake snacks
Rice cakes, banana, apple, cereal, blueberries or raisins, peanut butter
Fun toast friends
Use whatever you have in your cupboard or fridge to create a healthy fun toast snack
Bug snacks
Get creative with your fruit and vegetables
Get colourful
How many colours can you find in your fruit and vegetables?
If you have a blender at home then have a go at making this healthy Superhero Smoothie! Remember to use your prior learning about weight to use scales to weigh out the fruit, checking the correct number is showing. This recipe also requires you to measure out liquids. This can be done using a measuring jug where you must check if it fills up to the correct number and line shown on the side of the jug. You can also discuss what the language ‘empty, half full and full’ means as you pour your smoothie into your glass.
As part of healthy week and your previous learning about The Little Red Hen, have a go at baking your own bread rolls! This recipe also requires you to weigh out flour and measure out water. Spoons are used for measuring out ingredients for both of these recipes too! When dividing your dough into balls, think about halving the mixture again and again. How many rolls did you make? Can you share them out equally between your family? Remember to use a timer to measure the time for kneading and baking!
Whilst enjoying your smoothie and bread rolls, have a chat about where the different ingredients came from. Why is it important to eat and drink healthily?
PE –
Daily exercise helps to keep your body strong, brain active, mind happy and can aid better sleep! As mentioned on Monday, Healthy week usually involves a Wake Up Shake Up dance! Have a go at some of these dances to get your body moving and feeling energised…
Have a chat about how your bodies feel after exercise. Can you feel your heart beating faster? How does your temperature feel?
This week is Healthy Week! It’s an opportunity to celebrate our health and happiness. In school we would usually be planning lots of fun activities linked to health and self care including, making healthy snacks, taking part in a daily Wake Up Shake Up dance every morning with the rest of school and lots of fun physical activities. Although we won’t be able to be together to enjoy this fun week, we have planned lots of activities that link to Healthy Week that you can still do at home with your families.
Phonics
Read the instructions below as independently as you can. Adults, you can either show your child the instructions on the screen or write them up on a piece of paper/whiteboard to hold up for your child to read. You must do whatever the instruction says for 30 seconds to 1 minute.
Literacy
Now it’s time for you to write your own set of exercise instructions for someone or everyone in your family! Think about what you’d like them to do and have a go at writing your own for someone else to read and follow. You could use some of the ones you read earlier but have a go at sounding out the words and writing them by yourself. You could even use some of the moves from PE with Joe Wicks.
Find out all about Henri Matisse by watching Art with Mati and Dada. Find out about Mattise and his famous paintings. His artwork below is named The Snail. Can you notice the spiral in it?
After watching the video think about creating your own piece of art by experimenting with space, shape and colour.
Make your own spirals using natural materials. You can either make these when you go out for your daily exercise or collect some materials (leaves, twigs, small stones) whilst you’re out to create a spiral once you get back home. You could stick them down with some glue or just arrange them in a spiral shape and take a picture. See how creative you can get! Have a look at some of the pictures below for some inspiration.
Let’s listen to this opposites song to remind us of some of the measurement language we learnt earlier this week –
Length
Use playdough to make play dough snakes or worms of different lengths. Use your fine motor skills to gently roll out the snakes with your hands, making them longer and longer. Which one is the longest? Which one is the shortest? Are any the same size? Can you put them in order?
Go on a measuring hunt inside or outside. Use a length of ribbon or string and go hunt for things that are longer or shorter than it. Remember to always begin measuring from the very end of your ribbon all the way across to the other end. Record your answers in a table of longer/shorter by writing down the item or drawing a picture. You could also record your findings by taking photos of the item next to the ribbon for comparison.
Weight
Weight can be learnt in many different ways. You can measure by using your hands to hold items and compare how heavy you think they feel. You can stand or put heavier objects onto scales on the floor. You may have some scales in your kitchen for cooking. Talk about and go see if you have any scales. Do they have a dial? Are they digital? Do they have weights on the other side to compare and balance?
Think about other places or peoples jobs where scales are used and what they are used for. Eg – vets for weighing animals to check they are healthy.
Choose some different sized objects in your home to weigh in one of the ways we have discussed and have a go at ordering them from heaviest to lightest.
Use these challenge cards to extend your learning further –
Have a go at this weight game where pan scales are used to compare and decide if the food is heavier or lighter –
Begin your phonics learning by listening to this fun farmyard themed abc song –
Twinkl also has some blending and segmenting farm reading to have a go at. Once you have read the hotspot words, have a go at writing some labels for the other animals or farm related objects in the picture.
On Monday you started to talk about farm animals and listened to the story I Love Animals.
Have a go at designing and writing your own page for the book. Look at your tricky words to write ‘I love the’ and then choose which farm animal you love the best. Use your robot arms and basic code sheet to find the sounds that you need.
Challenge yourself by extending your sentence so that it includes an adjective (what does it look like? How does it feel?) and a verb (what is it doing on the farm?)
eg-
I love the fluffy yellow duckling quacking on the pond.
Draw a picture to go with your sentence making sure the colours and appearance of the animal matches your adjective!
We are moving on from doubling and halving and beginning to look at measurement. Grown-ups this is mostly just a focus on the accurate use of the language of measurement and being able to make comparisons in sizes, weight and capacity of at least 3 different objects. Our focus words will be;
Tall, tallest, taller
Short, shortest, shorter
Long, longest, longer
Small, smallest, smaller
Wide, widest, wider
Narrow, narrowest, narrower
Big, biggest, bigger
Heavy, heaviest, heavier
Light, lightest, lighter
Full, fullest, fuller
Empty, emptyist, emptier
Half full
Lets begin with this picture. Have a look at the farm animals in the picture and discuss the different sizes for example which animal is the biggest? Which is the smallest? Which animal has the longest ears? Which animal has the shortest tail? Which animal might be the heaviest? Which animal might be the lightest?
Why not have a go at ordering some of your toys at home from tallest to shortest or longest to smallest. On your daily walk see if you can find some leaves or twigs that you can bring home and order. Don’t forget to try your best to use the right words to describe the different sizes of your objects.
We hope you have been having lots of fun with Joe Wicks, Cosmic Kids and some crazy dances!
This week in your PE we would like to explore ‘counterbalance’, you can do this with a brother or sister or your parents. Counterbalance is using both yours and your partners body weight to create a pose and hold it, it is a good exercise to help you understand different movements and positions your body can achieve. Have a look at the different pictures below and see if you can recreate any of them!
Play a game of pictionary. Adults can draw something and you have to write the word as quickly as possible on your own piece of paper. Can you guess the picture before your grown-up finishes drawing? This week try to focus on words with 1 or more diagraphs. Choose your own pictures to draw or choose from the list below;
rain torch teepee beard shark sheep chain book
Literacy
We have been thinking lots about growing over the last few weeks. This week we would like you to start thinking about the animals that live and grow up on a farm. Today we would like you to have a go at writing down what you already know about animals on a farm such as pigs are big, cows eat grass. Have a think and discuss with your grown-ups about what animals might live on a farm, why do you think the farmer keeps that animal on a farm. What is the animal’s name when it is a baby for example baby cows are called calves.
Here is a lovely story about animals on a farm!
What is your favourite animal from the farm?
I have noticed that there are some new born lambs around some of the fields around the Poundbury area. See if you can spot them on your daily walk!
I hope that you all enjoyed your Bank Holiday weekend and that many of you were able to join in with the VE Day 75th Anniversary celebrations. During the celebrations you may have seen a few faces that are familiar to us all at this current point in history but who also had a vital role to play 75 years ago too, including Captain Tom and Her Majesty the Queen.
I am sure that if you did get a chance to join in or to watch the celebrations, that you will have found many links between the care that was shown within communities during a time of global conflict 75 years ago and what is happening in our world today. Two very different events, but two significant points in history when communities have witnessed ‘Oneness’ first hand and have seen acts of bravery, sacrifice, strength and resilience all around during the most difficult of times.
During the celebrations I am sure that you will have heard stories of ‘Hope’ and just as the rainbow is our current symbol of hope, in 1939 a popular singer, Dame Vera Lynn, released one of the world’s most popular wartime songs ‘We’ll Meet Again’. This became a source of optimism, strength and hope for many during wartime broadcasts and has become popular again during the Coronavirus crisis. You may have seen this performance of the song on Friday which beautifully draws the links between the two points in history and also celebrates many of the key workers who are currently showing their care for others through the work that they do every day.
I know that as a result of the work that some of you were doing on your class blogs last week, that many stories of ‘unsung’ WW2 heroes emerged such as the story of one of our friends’ great grandfathers Kenneth Sanderson, who played an incredible role on the frontline during the war. These stories remind us that the true heroes in difficult times aren’t always the most celebrated or the most famous but that their contributions can make such a difference to the lives of many and their worth will live on in the hearts of others forever. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
This week, I would like us to think about and celebrate all the ‘real-life’ helpers and heroes that are caring for us during the current crisis. Real people who are showing true bravery and sacrifice, taking increased risks to keep others safe.
Do you know of someone within our community who is going above and beyond to look after or care for others at this time? Maybe you have someone in your own home who you are bursting with pride for and want to tell their story? Maybe you have noticed someone who is quietly helping others without being celebrated or noticed? Our very own ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
I know that I am surrounded by many unsung helpers and heroes at the moment. I see school staff in school every day, willing to do anything that is needed to support our role within the community response to Covid 19 without question. There are also staff who are now based at home but are working incredibly hard to ensure that they are still supporting children, families and colleagues relentlessly during this difficult time. I get to see some of our key workers every day too, all smiling and all doing their absolute best to keep so many of our vital care and support services going at this time. And then my own very personal heroes – my treasured family.
So – your task this week is to share with me an image or a drawing of your ‘real-life’ hero or helper that you feel should be celebrated at this time and the reason why. You may have seen the piece of artwork above by Banksy that appeared in Southampton Hospital last week, beautifully depicting the role of ‘real’ heroes too.
I can’t wait to ‘meet’ your own personal heroes and who knows, in 75 years time when our own grandchildren and great-grandchildren are marking this point in history, they may be telling stories of the actual heroes and helpers that made a difference in 2020, so let’s start telling those stories now.
I think Her Majesty The Queen summed up our celebration of helpers and heroes beautifully at the end of her speech to the nation on Friday.
‘But our streets are not empty; they are filled with the love and the care that we have for each other. And when I look at our country today, and see what we are willing to do to protect and support one another, I say with pride that we are still a nation those brave soldiers, sailors and airmen would recognise and admire.’
Enjoy your week and your reflections on your very own ‘real-life’ heroes and helpers, people that we possibly took for granted before but now see in the light that they have always deserved. A huge thank you to all our key workers and unsung heroes from us all!
With warm wishes and my heartfelt hope that you too will ‘keep smiling through, just like you always do, til the blue skies chase the dark clouds far away …’
