Welcome Back to School!

I have has some personal issues that have kept me away.  Recently my outdoor area has been a bit neglected as the whole school was playing in it during the building works that were ongoing.  As the work has now finished, my outdoor area has had a new lease of life.  Pictures to follow soon.

Welcome sunshine

Last week for Pirate week my student took a group outside and made a grid with cones snd reference numbers.  This week the sunshine finally arrived!  One group went outside to make human number lines. I know my colleague next door has been sending her class outside to write their keywords in chalk.

Apologies

I've had a lot going on in my personal life and work life so not much time to update here. Also my classroom assistant had been off most of March. But I thought I would let you know about an upcoming event at my school. We are doing a Pirate Week. As part of the week, we have some outdoor activities planned.  We will be following treasure maps and learning about co-ordinates.  We also plan on doing some team building activities but with a pirate theme. Have any of you done a pirate week? What activities did you think up?

Adding using Numicon symbols

Today we took out some circular rubber mats and put a numicon shape on each and asked the children to throw two bean bags onto the shapes and add the numicon.  Later we changed the numicon shapes for numbers.This group is working on single digit addition.

Resource Review

I'm big on having a Child Initiated Learning style continuing into Year 1.  So I thought I would share this website http://www.ccjmaths.co.uk/index.php?option=com_jdownloads&Itemid=58&view=viewcategory&catid=72   The planning links the objective to different areas like art, role play, tuff spot and of course outdoors!  I've found it very helpful when stuck for some ideas.

Snow!

It's been snowing - a lot!  My outdoor space is pretty sloshy at the moment, so we haven't been doing much maths outside.  The children have been playing outside of course.  Indoors we have a toy shop and I've been trying to encourage the children to use money and prices.  Though mainly they just like hiding under the table!   We did a problem solving activity using compare bears 2 blue and 3 yellow lined up with a space in between, bears can only move 1 space at a time, they can jump forwards and back.  The children have to work out how to move the bears to different ends.  They did it with their problem partners and loved it.  I was thinking I could do this outside, by using hula hoops or a grid or even just 6 paving slabs!

Half

We've been working on the concept of half, but I'm sorry to say dear readers, I couldn't think of a practical activity for outdoors.  Maybe some of you can?  If you do have ideas, feel free to post a comment.  If I was in a more woodsy outdoor area, I suppose we could have filled up some containers half full with acorns, pine cones etc.  What do you think?