The Perfect Pet
Welcome back everyone!
We hope that you have had a wonderful week at home with your families.
This half term our learning will take place around the topic of animals. We will be exploring a range of texts based on animals and use these to inspire our narrative and non-fiction writing in English. Following on from our learning about the human body last half term, in Science we will learning about different animal groups and classifying a range of animals according to whether they are mammals, birds, fish and reptiles, carnivores, omnivores or herbivores.
Our core text for Autumn 2 is 'Mouse on the River' by Alice Melvin.
In English this week we have written animal riddles. We used lots of descriptive language to help the reader of our riddle guess the hidden animal.
In Design and Technology this half term we are going to design, make and evaluate an animal sliding mechanism which we'll use to create a picture of zoo animals where several animals are able to move by sliding or on a lever.
To begin this project, we looked at a range of books that have moving parts. We explored how we could make each part move and discussed how each mechanism worked.
We then practised the skills needed to make a slider mechanism.
In Art we are learning about the life and work of the French artist Henri Matisse.
This week we looked closely at one of Matisse's most famous pieces 'Goldfish' which he painted in 1912.
We found out that Matisse painted goldfish in the background of several of his works. We looked closely at the different goldfish and carefully sketched the lines and shapes we could see.
In Geography this half term we will be learning about the four countries of the United Kingdom. We started this unit of learning by revisiting our previous learning about our local area and talked about Nelson being a town in the country of England. We explored maps of Nelson and used geographical vocabulary to talk about the human and physical features we could see on each map.
In Science we compared a mammal (mouse) and amphibian (toad) and talked about their similarities and differences.
In Art we looked closely at a range of animal prints and carefully sketched the lines, shapes and shades we could see.
We enjoyed a very exciting visit with Dylan and his many different reptiles! We learnt so much about reptile habitats and diets and it was wonderful to see real reptiles close up!
