Dear Parents,

We have had a very exciting and successful STEM week with the theme of time!

On Monday, Johnson Matthey came in and gave us a workshop on ‘spinning through space’ and in assembly Johnson Matthey showed us the effects of an iodine clock reaction! We completed an apple oxidation experiment, where we sliced up apples and put them into bags with different liquids, these included, lemon juice, orange juice, vinegar, water and milk and one bag with no liquid in. We have been observing the apples over the week and discussing the differences in the apples and why some have browned more than others ad some have become very soft. The children wrote up their experiment and we discussed as a class the results. we accumulated all of this onto a poster for the British Science Week STEM poster competition.

The children have really enjoyed creating their own clocks and beginning to understand how a clock works, what the different hands mean and how we can use it to tell the time. They have made clocks with paper plates, melting clocks inspired by Salvador Dali and making split pin watches using paper cups. We have been doing lots of activities focusing on how long it takes us to do them to help give the children a better understanding of time and what you can achieve in one minute or 10, 10 minutes or an hour etc. We timed how many star jumps we can do in 1 minute, how many times can we write our name in 2 minutes and how many times we can sing a nursery rhyme in 2 minutes. The children have been making a giant clock and a giant sand timer as well as their own individual sand timers out of plastic bottles. We have been timing how long our own domino challenges take and seeing how many dominoes we can use!

In Maths, we have been exploring time by looking at our daily routine and how long the activities take, we have been learning the days of the week, here is a fun song to help your child practice.

Here are some Phonics videos to practice set 1 and 2 sounds at home:

Speed sounds set 1

Learning to blend (3)

Reading the ‘igh’ sound

Spelling the ‘igh’ sound

In cooking, we made bread and measured the change in the dough after we left it to rise for 2 hours. We drew around the dough and then compared how much bigger the dough was after the 2 hours and then we tasted the bread on Friday!

Next week, we are having an Easter Challenge week, focusing on completing challenges every day to earn a reward at the end of the week. The challenges will be focusing on developing the children’s resilience and perseverance. Some of the challenges the children will be doing are making 3D shapes with Cocktail sticks and marshmallows, writing an Easter poem, creating salt dough flowers, making pop up Easter cards and ordering the life cycle of a rabbit.

Challenge:

• Can you and your child think of a time they have shown resilience or persevered in the face of a challenge? They could write this on their Wow Sheet to share.
• Can your child find out about the lifecycle of an animal (e.g. sheep, rabbit, chicken) and draw it to share in show and tell.

We hope you all have a restful weekend.

Thank you for your continued support.

The Kites Team.