Animals and new friends

Animals and new friends

Since Half term the childrens interests have lead us to a topic all about animals. We have been able to explore many different things within this topic, 

Our caterpillar interest has continued with the arrival of over very own class caterpillars. We are watching with great interest as they grow and change...

This has allowed us to produce some great writing and drawing of the life cycle of a butterfly.

The lovely Mrs King has supported the children with their love of animals and over the last few weeks has shared some of her furry friends with us.

Every monday this half term she has brought a selection of her guinea pigs and rabbits to spend the day in yr R. First we had to get the cage ready for them 

The children have loved this and we all got to meet and cuddle and stroke Furgus and Little Ted.

For some of us this was not naturally a thing that we felt comfortable with, but with encouragement everyone got to interact with the guinea pigs at a level they felt comfortable..

This lead to drawing, talking and taking observations of the Guinea pigs

Rabbits and more Guinea pigs have visited on mondays, we have had Joey the rabbit and Norman and Arthur come to visit us .(more Guinea pigs)

Have you ever heard of a chicken in a classroom???

Feathers one of our school chickens came to spend some time in class ( in a crate of course), we all heard about it!This caused great excitement in the class as well as with the hens outside but it was for a necessary reason, apart from being a great experience for the children to have and observe the behaviour of her it meant we could encourage feathers to stop sitting on the eggs in the coup everyday. As you can imagine this worked I think the thought of regularly having to come into class helped her change her mind!

Finally as well as welcoming in our furry friends.. Yr R have been fantastic at welcoming in the new children who will be starting Yr R in september.

We have been so pleased with the kindness and behaviour of the whole class. all of them taking time to get to know the new children, joining in with their games and showing some of the many things we have on offer for them to do once they are here at school. Many pictures and letters have been drawn and given to the children to make them feel welcomed. 

River Ober Trip

We had a fantastic time at the New Forest today! We went to visit the River Ober to learn about its features and to investigate how the river changes and develops.

We began by walking to the source of the river. We looked at the marshland and saw how the ground became saturated and caused water to form pools on the surface. We also saw how the landscape changed as the water began to flow into a stream.

We then went to the main channel to look at the course of the river by going down to Puttles Bridge. It was time to put our wellies on and go in the water! We were quite surprised at how cold the water was! We felt the current of the water against our wellies and explored how the water depth varied across the channel. We also did our best dance in our wellies to see all of the silt and sand that was trapped amongst the rocks!

We also sketched some of the things that we could see. 

After lunch amongst the New Forest ponies, we then went further downstream to compare how the river's course had changed at Whitemoor Bridge. We took part in a range of different activities...

We made an annotated diagram of the meanders, erosion and deposition...

We used keys to identify the different trees and vegetation....

We played 'Pooh Sticks' and timed how long it took them to flow under the bridge so we could get an idea of the speed of the current...

And we also measured the width and depth of the water using measuring equipment.

We all had a great day - we're now a class of river experts!

We are Cryptographers

We are Cryptographers

As part of our computing topic, we are learning about coding.  Before we have begun using the ICT equipment we have been finding out about the different way codes can be sent.

This week we have learnt about Semaphore. 

Flag semaphore is the telegraphy system conveying information at a distance by means of visual signals with hand-held flags, rods, disks, paddles, or occasionally bare or gloved hands. Information is encoded by the position of the flags; it is read when the flag is in a fixed position. Semaphores were adopted and widely used (with hand-held flags replacing the mechanical arms of shutter semaphores) in the maritime world in the 19th century.

Can you work out what this message says?

 

We had great fun making our own flags before trying to send messages to our friends.