Rowan are checking calculations using the inverse

We have had another very busy week in Year 1 and 2 as usual. The children have impressed us all with their resilience and persistence in their work this week – we are delighted to see such great learning behaviour. 

In maths, we have been continuing with our work on addition and subtraction, supporting our calculations with concrete resources to promote understanding. The children have used the bar and part-part-whole models to show prove their calculations, then writing number sentences to go with their pictorial representations. We have started to talk about using the inverse to check calculations, and proving our answers in this way.

We continue with our Read Write Inc programme every morning, but on Thursday and Friday, we enjoyed teaching English to our classes as Mr Read and Mrs Askwith were out on a course. We have been writing about the Great Fire of London, learning to use word banks for spelling and improving our work by included expanded noun phrases. 

The children have been learning about making predictions in science, and using this knowledge to predict the outcome of an exciting experiment to be carried out next week. The question was ‘What is the best material for building a house?’. We discussed different possible materials and talked about the benefits and challenges for using them.

In ICT we have continued out work on being safe on line, by discussing the personal information that we can share online, and that which is not safe to share. 

History has been our main focus this week – the children have been enthralled with the story of the Great Fire of London and have even been acting it out at playtime! We have learnt about the events of the week of 2nd September 1666 and written our own narrative of what happened. 

To support this topic, the children have started to construct their houses from cardboard boxes. We are looking forward to completing them over the next few weeks, reading for the big finale before the end of the half term!