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In expedition, we read a beautiful book called ‘Counting Creatures’. It introduced us to lots of different animals and spoke about their babies whilst also telling us how many babies that animal would typically have. We really enjoyed the book and thought that the pictures and lift up flaps were great!
We used some of the pictures from the book to match the adult animals with their babies. We practised using some new vocabulary such as owlets, tadpoles and caterpillars. We worked extremely hard in our groups to make sure we had matched up each animal to their babies correctly. We noticed that some of the babies looked just like their grown ups only smaller, but some babies did not look like their grown ups at all – they were a little trickier to work out but we showed great resilience in trying to find the right match!
Our new friend number 2 needed our help! He wanted the boys and girls in nursery to help him do his food shopping but before we could, he reminded us that he only liked to buy things in twos. We had to look carefully at the food and make sure that we counted out 2 of the items he had asked for, before putting them into the shopping trolley.
We were all really supportive of each other, and we helped our friends check that they had accurately counted out 2 food items.
This week in maths, our focus has been the number 2. We started off by talking about what 2 looks like represented as spots and objects arranged as a dice pattern, different patterns and different sizes. We talked about how it was different to 1 because 1 was always by itself whereas 2 was 1 and another 1.
We used this learning to help us create a path for a little kitten who wanted to get from the red counter to the yellow counter. However, the path could only include stepping stones that showed 2! We used our subitising skills to work as a group to decide which stepping stones we could use to create a safe path for the kitten to use to get from one counter to the other.
Our expedition lesson today continued to look at grouping living things. First, we recapped our previous learning on vertebrates and invertebrates, working with our partner to sort a variety of animals.
From here we started to classify vertebrates into 5 groups and watched a video clip to help us build background knowledge. We noted down facts and then shared these with the whole crew. We then explored a variety of texts, building further information on mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish. We played fastest finger to further assess our understanding. There were lots of reading opportunities again today, reading with a partner and echo read to name a few.
From here we worked in mini crews to demonstrate our understanding. We read a variety of facts and put these facts in the correct group.
We then took part in a quiz to test our understanding further! We are really enjoying our expeditionary lessons 🙂
Today we had a try at making our first plot point better. We reflected on what the learning was for the lesson and if we had been successful in achieving it. We read our own work and a partners work and we gave some critique. We then looked at a crew members work together and tried to make this better using the features on our target grids. We then had a go at improving our own work.
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Crew Hamill already had some knowledge of Rosa Parks prior to this lesson as we had looked at her briefly during hook week and also came across her name during our lessons on Martin Luther King Jr. We knew already that he had helped her when she had been arrested but this lesson allowed us to find out in more detail exactly why she had been arrested and why this was so important. We worked together to become experts on Rosa Parks, looking at four different sources of evidence: a newspaper article, a story, some direct quotes and the police report from her arrest. We worked in pairs to analyse these sources of evidence and pull out as much information as we could, adding it to our BBK. We then came together as a full crew and shared this information to create chotting sheets for our class display.
We began this lesson by watching a video of Martin Luther King Jr’s speech, “I Have a Dream”, discussing how it made us feel and any notices we made about it. We then spent some time looking at some of the key vocabulary from the speech that we might have needed some support understanding: manacle, stripped, selfhood, quicksand, injustice, sweltering, oppression. Once we had more of an understanding of these words, we looked at a selection of quotes from MLK’s speech that included this vocabulary and we worked as a crew to pull them apart. This allowed us to really understand some of the key messages Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to get across in his speech.
Crew Hamill have absolutely loved learning about Martin Luther King Jr. over the last few weeks. Having looked at him briefly in hook week, we have learned a little more about him during our reading lessons by focusing on a story of his life. Because of this, we already had some knowledge of who he is and why he is so important to our expedition and this set us in good stead for our expedition lessons in which we have built our background knowledge ever further. We have worked in mini crews to highlight chunks of information, pulling out the facts about Martin Luther King Jr. We have also watched a video clip on the story of his life which allowed us to make more notes on our chotting paper. After this, we then brought all of our information together as a crew to create a class chotting sheet for our display, drawing our attention to the key dates which we can then add to our class timeline.
