Room 4 @ CPDS

After an instructional maths group with the teacher, the children are often encouraged to show their learning and practice the skills through an independent task or game. This group has been working on adding and subtracting numbers to 10. These questions are called "change unknown" because they're trying to determine the missing number. They can be tricky to work out! A word problem we might use to accompany these number problems would be something similar to "Miss Russell had 6 lollipops at the start of the day. Now she only has 5 left. How many did she eat?" :)

In Term 2, we began looking at Information Reports - why we might write an Information Report and what an Information Report consists of. There are four main parts: title, introduction/classification, description and conclusion. This writing genre fit in perfectly with our focus on farms and farm animals. The children chose a farm animal that interested them the most. In groups with others who liked the same animal, they brainstormed what they knew about the animal, in particular, what it looks like, where it lives, and what it does. Then we set out to write our Reports.

Please click here  to view our photos from Ambury Farm.

The focus of Term 2 Inquiry was Technology, specifically building and structures. Using the Three Little Pigs story, we discussed animal structures and why we thought it was important for animals to have good houses. We then visited Ambury Farm. Afterwards, we looked at pictures of the animal houses we saw there. We talked about what animals needed in their houses and what made a good animal house. Here is the Room 4 thinking around this: Using the children's ideas for what a good animal house needed, we then posed a building challenge: The children were so creative in building their structures! 

We have been learning about adjectives and focussing on using them in our writing. We went out to the school garden to experience our surroundings. We thought about what we could see, hear, feel and smell. On big posters with photos from the gardens, we recorded adjectives to describe many of the things we saw. Then we worked to use the adjectives in sentences, with a goal to write about three or more things from the garden. The children write beautiful, descriptive sentences using their adjectives!

We read the Big Book "Hairy Bear and the Door". In the story, Hairy Bear needs to build a new door for his house. He says "a house must have a door to stop the wind and the rain." Unfortunately he hits his hand with the hammer and can't build anymore! His wife arranges for his friends to pitch in and finish building it for him. At the end of the week, we posed a building challenge to the Room 3 and 4 students. Can you build a door for Hairy Bear?  There were just two parameters: it had to be strong enough to stand up against the wind and strong enough to stand up against the rain. We saw so much creativity in the doors that were built!