It was lovely to see the children back at school this week and we hope you all had an enjoyable half term!

Before we left for the break, we re-planted our beans in some soil and watered them well.

We couldn’t quite believe it when we returned on Monday and discovered they had grown almost as high as the ceiling!  Perhaps they really were magic beans 😉

Our growing beanstalks inspired some of our maths work this week: we added the correct amount of leaves to each of our previously ordered beanstalks, demonstrating our understanding of numerals as representations of quantity.

And we continued to practise our subitising skills:

image from CBeebies on Facebook

We have been saying “Do not count, see the amount”! which you can practise in this Numberblocks episode.

Our Spotlight Story this week was the story of Rama and Sita which you can revisit on the CBeebies website.  Scroll down to the Diwali story at the bottom of the page.

image from Amazon.co.uk

We also found out how this Hindu festival of light is celebrated; with diya lamps, special clothes, Mendhi patterns, Rangoli patterns, Diwali cards and lots of sweets!  And we met Jessica who explained how she celebrates Diwali with her family.

 

In our music lesson this week, we learnt that the beat helps us to think about how fast or slow the music is.  We listened to the song ‘Celebration’ by Kool and the Gang and moved our bodies in time to the beat.  We talked about what a celebration is and decided it’s “when everyone gets together to have a party” – just like Jessica does when celebrating Diwali!

We used an online metronome to listen carefully to very slow beats (30 BPM) and very fast beats (244 BPM).  We were able to play Celebration at the same time as the metronome to try and work out how many BPM there are in this particular song.  I was so impressed by the children’s listening skills, as some of them were able to say that the beat on the metronome was too small (slow) or too big (fast)!!  A quick Google search revealed that Celebration is actually 121BPM and we all agreed that that sounded about right!

We also noticed that Diwali is often celebrated with firework displays and many of us shared that we were looking forward to seeing fireworks this week on Bonfire Night!

We watched some amazing firework displays on youtube including this one from New Year’s Eve in London in 2018/2019: