This week, the children have written their own poems about pets in the style of our English text, I Love Bugs. They've worked really hard on their ideas and written them out in best handwriting, too. We'll be creating a special display of their work and also plan to make up a class book containing a copy of all their poems, which they'll enjoy sharing during our free reading sessions.

In maths, Year 1s have compared groups by matching objects - and created a lovely collection of natural materials, as you'll see in the photos. They then turned their attention to the concepts of fewer, more, the same. greater than, less than and equal to. Meanwhile, the Year 2s have been learning how to use a number for counting tens and ones.

In topic, we carried out a 'decision alley' activity about Christopher Columbus. Some children tried to persuade a group of 'mini Columbuses' to go on a voyage of exploration while others discouraged them. The outcome was that most of the 'minis' decided to go! They then had a go at a Diamond 4 activity, in which they had to rank his reasons for going in order of importance. PIX ON IPAD. There were also some 'red herrings' thrown into the mix! These activities helped the children to think about why someone might risk their life to travel to unknown territories, especially at a time when so little was known about the world.

In RE, we were again joined by the Year 1s from Holly class and really enjoyed watching a film clip about 'The Creation Story'. The children were given a set of pictures with captions to sequence. Year 1s and Year 2s worked very well together in pairs to complete this activity.

Finally, in Science, we became senses detectives.  The children had to use all of their senses to find clues to solve a problem.  They had to feel items in bags to find something furry.  They had to smell odours to find a minty smell.  They had to find a footprint that was 10cm long (and use a ruler accurately to do this).  They were also blindfolded for the final two tests, finding a squeak from range of sounds and tasting an apple from a range of foods.  The apple, cucumber and salty crisps were popular but the lemon and the black olives were not!  We all really enjoyed the investigation.