The starting point for our learning this week was this beautiful illustration by the French artist and entomologist Adolphe Philippe Millot (1857-1921):
image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg
We found out that eggs come in all sorts of different colours, sizes and shapes and there are even some animals that lay eggs under the sea!
One of these creatures is especially incredible; it has 3 hearts, 9 brains, 8 legs and over 2000 fingers! Can you guess which sea animal this might be? That’s right, it’s the highly intelligent octopus. We read the story of Inky the Octopus by Erin Guendelsberger and David Leonard which you can revisit here:
We were amazed to discover that the story is actually based on the real-life escape of an octopus called Inky from an aquarium in New Zealand in 2016. We watched a newsround clip from the time to find out more.
We discovered that octopi are molluscs, which means they are cousins of snails and slugs. Their bodies are very squishy which explains why they can fit themselves through very small gaps. We read a (sort of) non-fiction book (Could an Octopus Climb a Skyscraper) to help us find out even more about these fascinating animals:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59_chy3bpLI
We discovered that octopi can change the colour and texture of their bodies to blend into the background behind them! We learnt that this is called camouflage.
We looked at some amazing photos of animals camouflaged in the wild and then we headed out onto our field to create some of our own! We chose a (toy) animal from our ‘out of the egg’ basket and looked carefully at the colours on its body. We then looked very carefully at the colours in nature to find something similar to help camouflage our animal. Next, we took our own photos on the Ipad – aren’t they amazing? It looks like we might have some budding National Geographic photographers:
In our phonics lessons, we learnt the final set 1 sound, ‘nk’. This sound is another special friends sound and the saying that goes with it is ‘I think I stink’.
In our maths lessons this week, we have been starting to think about composition and we have been learning to use the words ‘part’ and ‘whole’. First, we played the hidden object game where we had to guess what the whole object hidden behind the rectangle might be, when we could only see a part of it.
Then, we made our own hidden object game and found a friend to guess what our whole hidden animal might be when they looked at just a small part of it:
After that, we sang an old favourite; Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes which you might like to sing again at home:
We then used the sentence “My (something) is a part of me and the whole of me is (my name)” to help us think about the different parts of our body making up the whole of us.
Next, we watched this Numberblocks clip to help us connect this concept with numbers:
Why not have a go at making up your own Numberblocks (part, part, whole) song at home!
Have a lovely weekend everyone and see you on Monday.