Building boats and rafts

We have used the story Mr Gumpy's Outing for our literacy work and everyone has had great fun acting out the story, making story maps and writing speech bubbles for each of the characters. Children have been working hard developing literacy skills such as rehearsing the sentence they would like to write, listening carefully to hear all the sounds in the words they are writing, remembering to use spaces between words and adding punctuation at the end. Fantastic work Form 1!

In maths, we have been learning all about taking away and using different strategies to solve these problems, using real objects and their fingers as a starting point. Children then learnt how to use a number line to find the answer, finding the number we are subtracting from on the number line first and then drawing the jumps back to find the answer. We have had fun jumping along and back on large number lines outside and singing songs where numbers get smaller each time.

Boats offered up a great opportunity for the children to explore floating and sinking, so we conducted an experiment to see which objects sink or float. Predictions were made not only about what might happen but also why. Children shared their ideas and theories and then conducted a test to find out. Lots of conversations about different materials, shapes, weight and sizes were had as children explored this concept. We discovered that often metal things sink, but that foil will float depending on shape - very interesting!