Terms 5 & 6

Our Key Question for Terms 5 & 6 is:

What are the natural

treasures of Belton?

And so we enter our final terms of the year!  

Our learning environment has changed again, as we travel from Space, to our local beautiful Belton.

As always we will be adding to our classroom as we create new additions...

This tree branch shows our 'learning journey' for this term.  

As we complete a different aspect of our learning for this term, our teachers will add our work and photos to show what we have achieved.

We worked together to add blossom to the letters and the tree.

Our Skill for Learning & Life this term is: Independence

Sally the Independent Snail has helped us to think about ho we can do things for ourselves, by ourselves and how that by believing in ourselves we can achieve anything we work hard at!

We worked with our Talking Partners to share our Easter news.  

We were practising not just the skill of speaking, but of listening to our partner.  We had some wonderful tales to tell!

We have started this term by thinking about special places.  Where is your special place?  We thought about our homes and how they are a special place for us. 

We then thought about how people from different religions pray in different types of places.

As a Christian school, we pray at school or at St. Wulfram's - our church.  

We learnt that: people who believe in Judaism are called Jews and they pray in a Synagogue; and that people who believe in Islam are called Muslims, they pray to 'Allah' in a Mosque.

We worked collaboratively to use mosaic to make each of the 3 special places. We also wrote sentences in our Project Books, describing why each of the 3 places were special to the people that prayed in them.

We have had a special visitor to help us to know how to use the internet safely.

We learnt that if we see something when we are on the internet that makes us feel uncomfortable, or we think isn't suitable for us to see, that we shouldn't just turn it off - we should TELL SOMEONE - to tell an ADULT.

We learnt a song to help us to remember to do this...

We know how to start the day in Diamond Class!

There is always so much to do, and we love starting the day playing and sharing with our friends.

REAL Project Launch:

 Belton House, Grantham

What a wonderful day we had at Belton to launch our new project.  We explored many different areas as we began to answer our key question:

'what are the natural treasures

of Belton House?'

A great big THANK YOU to everyone who helped make our day such a success.

We have learnt that 'natural' means 'from nature'. So the things we concentrated on were things that had grown, be born or constructed from things that had been grown from the ground.

We looked at lots of natural aspects of Belton:

1. Tropical Plants in the Orangery

We noticed that the plants in the warm Orangery were quite different to those we found outside.

2. Gardens

There were so many different flowers and trees in the gardens.  We were amazed by the different colours, shapes and sizes.

3. Insects

We had lots of fun searching for bugs.  We gently used magnifying glasses so we could look at them closely.

4. Wildlife

We saw many different birds, both in the sky and on the water; were also welcomed by the deer, which Belton House is famous for; and saw lots of colourful fish in the Orangery Pool.

5. Wood

Wood was available for us to use to build dens - this was such fun!

6. Water

Water was used in lots of different ways: ponds; pools; lakes; streams; water fountains.

7. Stone

Stone was carved to make statues - there were lots of different ones to find

8. Maze 

Shrubs were planted to make a maze that we enjoyed finding our way in and out of! We had to use our positional language to direct each other.

Introducing the new members of Diamond Class - our caterpillars!

We have been learning the importance of treating these creatures with care and respect.  We can't wait to watch them transform...

We are being artists!  

We will soon start redrafting our pictures we drew at Belton House of some of the beautiful flowers we found there. We will draw the first few drafts using pencils and pencil crayons, but will use paint for our final draft - our 'work of excellence'.

We have been practising our painting skills, and have experimented with paint, seeing how 2 different sized brushes and a sponge can be used to create so many different marks.

We have been watching a critique 'work of excellence'.  We watched Ron Berger show us 'Austin's Butterlfly'.  

It helped remind us of the rules of Critique:

Be Kind

Be Specific 

Be Helpful

We wrote our own Class Rubric about how to draw a flower.  

We then used our Class Rubric and Works of Excellence (photographs from our trip) to help us Peer Critique each others first drafts, and gave feedback, remembering the important rules:

Be kind - tell the artist what you think they have done well

Be Specific - choose just one area to focus on which you think could be improved to make the drawing even better than it is already

Be Helpful - give specific and detailed ideas of how the artists can make the change you have suggested

As you can see in our second drafts, critique works brilliantly to help us make our work even better.

We have been given a mission by Mrs Parker.  She has asked us to make our own Ladybird rocks. They had to be works of excellence.  We will let parents know soon what they are for.  Watch this space...!

Ladybirds inspired some Maths activities for us too this week.  

We enjoyed playing Bingo to practise our number recognition to 20, and worked brilliantly in teams to play a Ladybird dice game.  We threw a dice and found a card that matched our number. Then we turned it over to count how many ladybirds there were, and how many spots altogether by counting in twos.  We then practised taking turns until all the cards had gone.  We then had to add up all our ladybirds and spots at the end, to see who had the most.  Great fun! 

We have been so excited and interested to watch our caterpillars metamorphosize into butterflies. Just look at them now. Wow!

The caterpillars ate their special food and formed a chrysalis.  We then waited patiently, for over 10 days, and then they started to hatch, and we were rewarded with beautiful butterflies.

Then we had to add branches to give them a habitat, and we also gave them sugar solution, oranges and tulips as food.  They then ate the food and grew stronger and stronger.  Our next job is to set them free into the school garden.

And so the time came for us to say farewell to our butterflies.  We took them out to the new Year 2 garden and set them free. One of them flew right up high above the road and then came straight back to see us.  

Bye bye butterflies - thank you for helping us learn all about your life cycle.

Our project outcome:

Exhibition launch at Belton House

We worked so hard to paint beautiful flowers, draw colourful butterflies and create activity leaflets for our Exhibtion at Belton House.

Our teachers displayed all our works of excellence on boards which are now in the Discovery Centre at Belton House throughout the whole of July.  

Towards the end of the term Year 2 invited us to their Presentation of Learning.  

They held a mini Sports Day for us, full of different activities that they had designed and tested. They kept score, and at the end we all won medals - it was such fun!