Living and Learning: Mental Health
We’ve started a three week block of Living and Learning lessons around mental health this week. Being able to identify and talk about our feelings and emotions is an important part of mental health. In our Living and Learning lesson today, we shared our feelings and emotions and discussed how these can change. The children considered different things we can do if we’re feeling angry, sad, worried, anxious.
When I feel angry I ….
listen to music
read a book
listen to the sound of birds
take time out
lie down
do some breathing techniques
do some mindfulness
The following emotions, stress and anxiety, came up a lot in our class discussion so we thought of strategies to help to ease these.
Reduce Stress and Anxiety
Using a fidget toys cannot prevent or eliminate these issues, but they can help to calm our strong emotions. We have a selection of these in our room so we each took turns in touching them and describing how fidget toys may help to ease some of our emotions.
Finally, the children created some helping heroes. These advertised some self help techniques for others.
Maths: area
In maths, we’ve been learning about area – the space inside a 2D shape. We’ve used a range of skills when learning about area: estimating, comparing, counting and reading.
Help at home: Why not check out this video to support your child’s maths learning at home!
Digital Artists
Today, the children used photos they had taken previously to create some digital art. Using an app on the iPads, the class enhanced their photos. Some chose to add very vivid colours while others opted for black and white.
After some time exploring the possibilities, we showcased some of the images onto the main teaching screen.
In the next lesson, the children will continue to edit and use paint effects to enhance their images further.
Topic: Commenting on the work of famous architects.
We have been looking at the work of the famous architect Sir Christopher Wren today. He won the commission to design St. Paul’s Cathedral after it was destroyed in the Great Fire of London. His design was chosen by King Charles II. We have looked at Christopher Wren’s designs and compared them to a photo of the actual cathedral and made observations about both.
We then designed our own Cathedral.
Maths in Year 3
We have enjoyed working together in a group to solve number problems in maths this week.
We have been learning about place value and adding and subtracting ones, tens and hundreds. Sometimes we have had to exchange and using the number frames really helps.
What’s that Sound?
We have been investigating pitch in Year 3 Science today.
We used different sizes and shapes of container to see whether the pitch was different when we plucked the elastic bands.
Pitch is how high or low a sound is.
Volume is how loud a sound is.
It was great fun playing our elastic band guitars!
Spellings for Friday 18th November
continue
regular
popular
knew
rescue
would
really
with
Practice spellings with the ‘ue’ phoneme. Try writing some sentences using ‘ue’ words.
18 November
Below are the new spellings for the next two weeks. On the first week, use the look, say, cover, write, check method.
- of
- once
- pull
- one
- our
Author visit – Alex Willmore
This afternoon, we watched and listened to the author and illustrator Alex Willmore reading his story I did see a mammoth, live on zoom.
Afterwards, we helped Alex draw a mammoth coming up with lots of different ideas. We suggested he could draw the mammoth wearing a Christmas jumper and elf shoes.
Challenge: Have a go at drawing a mammoth at home. Think about what they might be wearing, where they are, is there anyone/anything else around them? Bring your drawings in to share with your friends.
Topic
In our Topic lesson today, Year 1 and Year 2 came together! We compared works of art by one of our feature artists Bridget Riley, who specialised in ‘optical art’. She made flat images look like they are moving, creating a visual illusion.
At home, why not create your own optical illusion? We talked about how this could be done in irregular patterns. We’d love to see these in class if you do!