We will begin today by watching a video clip about a little boy who has to leave his tree house behind and move to the city (This is linked to Connie’s, Isaac’s and Megan’s questions linked to living in houses and moving house). We will discuss the children’s questions once we have watched the video. Then we will watch the video again and recall the key events and the characters, as well as talking about the beginning, the middle and the end. We will also remind the children about when we compared environments and we will ask them what they notice about the settings - the countryside environment and the town environment. Finally we will explain to the children that they are going to make a plaque to take home, just like the boy in the story had. We will remind them of using the pinch and flick technique and will encourage them to use their name cards to support letter formation. If they wish they can decorate their plaque too.

Connie: “Do all people live in the same houses in their life? Why do people move house?” Isaac: “Why do people live in houses?” Megan: “Do all people live in houses?”

Also we will be revisiting the Powerpoint about Bekonscot today as well as the risk assessment that the children compiled about our visit.

Today we have our trip to Bekonscot Model Village. The children will be out of school for the whole day. They will need a packed lunch, sturdy shoes, a waterproof coat and a sun hat. We will send out a reminder on the previous day.

During the ay we will answer Tilly’s question (Why do people have to pay to go there?”) and Hania’s (Why do people go there?”).

Nyla-Rae asked (about Bekonscot) “Why are the houses small?” Sammy was also interested in the size of the houses. We will talk about this before moving onto our maths activity. We will explain that we are going to play a game using very small houses (from Monopoly). This game involves revealing hidden groups of houses and prompting the children to say how many they see. We will show them upturned dishes hiding three, four and five houses, then we will rapidly swap them around and challenge the children to keep track of the dish with four, for example. When we stop and briefly lift a dish, the children will need to intuitively subitise the number revealed, telling us how many they see. We will repeat this with different groups of houses and a different target number. We will remind the children of numerals and numeral names during this activity too - showing them the numeral that corresponds to the target group that we are trying to keep track of. Throughout we will encourage all the children to contribute and use subitising skills.

Today the children will be taking part in a dance workshop with Premier sports. They will be changing for this activity so please ensure that their named PE kits are in school.

Friday

Linked to Connie’s (“Why are the pretend houses not like real houses?”, Oliver’s (“Why are the houses pretend?”) and Teddy’s questions (“Why do some  houses have two chimneys?”) we are going to be using our imagination to have an adventure today. We will talk about how the makers of Bekonscot had to use their imagination and plan and work together to build the model village. We are going to do something similar now in the classroom (but not making a permanent structure) and then using the structures created to begin to take on roles and take part in story telling.. We will remind the children that they need to listen carefully as we are not going to be giving the instructions as it is a recording. We are going to need ‘bold adventurers’ and ‘quiet explorers’ for this activity to work and so that we can ‘make things happen’. We will play the recorded activity to the children, pausing as needed and then going back to the activity later in the morning so that they can complete it.