This week in RDT, we have continued to explore our learning focus for this half-term, which centres on growth and change within living things. We have noticed and made changes to different things throughout the week to help us develop our understanding of this. We are learning to see how change can be positive and reflect on our journeys so far to help us feel proud of everything that we have achieved as we have grown. Looking at change, as well as noticing similarities and differences between different things, helps us to develop our understanding of the world.
At the start of the week, we embraced change at lunchtime when we had our first visit to the large playground. We had lots of fun trying out new activities with our friends and Year 6 buddies! We enjoyed dancing to the boom-box music, exploring new spaces and playing ball games together. Spending time in the large playground will help with our transition to Year 1 as we become familiar with new places and routines in school.
This week, we made our own changes to our talk for writing text by innovating the ‘How to Catch a Star’ story. We began by reflecting on our model text and made suggestions about how we could make changes to it. We came up with some fantastic alternatives, which included butterflies, spiders from Australia and unicorns! We then created our own plans in our ACE Writer books, using our drawing skills to innovate the story in our chosen way. We used our plan as a guide when writing our innovated story down on paper and then read it back to an adult once we had finished.
This week, we spent time looking at how our bean plants have changed by closely observing them. We used talk to describe what they look like now that they are growing. We came up with words like “spikey”, “split” and “curled” to describe what we could see. What a difference to how they looked on day one!
On Thursday, we had a ‘red, white and blue’ day to commemorate the 80th Anniversary of VE Day. We came to school wearing those colours and learned that this was to represent the union jack flag. Some of us decided to create our own union jack flags and bunting in the writing area whilst exploring provision. We used a photograph of a VE Day street party to develop our understanding that it happened a long time ago. We noticed many similarities and differences between then and now, sharing our ideas during a whole-class discussion. We first noticed that in the photograph were lots of children just like us, who were smiling and happy. We made links to our own lives by talking about our own experiences of going to parties and having party food just like in the photo.
We then thought about what was different and how life has changed since the photograph was taken. We looked closely at the clothes that the children were wearing and talked about how they were different. We noticed that the party was taking place in the middle of a road which prompted a discussion about road safety and how there are many more cars on the road now than there were back then. We also noticed that the photograph did not have any colour and discussed how cameras and photographs have changed over time. Some of us came to the conclusion that the children were wearing red, white and blue for the party just like us, even though we didn’t know for certain. We had so many wonderful thoughts to share about how life has changed since VE day!
Some of us decorated red, white and blue paper and made party hats, just like the children in the street party photograph were wearing!
Next week, we will be using the story ‘Peepo!’ to help us answer our big question, ‘How have I changed?’. We will be using our baby photos to reflect on how we have changed since being a baby. For our Friday storytelling activity, we decided to create a story about a baby. We used what we already know about babies to choose what would happen in our story. Some of us talked about our experiences of having baby siblings, cousins, neighbours and friends. In our story we included things like what a baby eats, where they sleep and the things they learn to do. This will help us next week when we start to compare what we did when we were babies to what we can do now.
We enjoyed having our Year 6 Storytelling Heroes help us scribe our stories when they came to visit us. As well as modelling how to write in longer sentences, they helped us to use our phonics skills to write down words and phrases ourselves. Our storytelling hero sessions are always a highlight of our week!
We’ve had a really busy week of noticing and making changes in RDT! Over the weekend, you could continue to reflect on our big question, ‘How have I changed?’ by looking with your family at photographs and talking about how much you have grown. You could use things like teddies and toys or clothing that you have outgrown to help you think about how you have changed and anything which might still be the same. We look forward to hearing your thoughts next week!