We are Class 2!: July 2015

Sunday, July 26, 2015

A big thank you

I just wanted to say thank you to you all for the lovely gifts that I had at the end of term. I have been overwhelmed by your generosity and kindness. Saying goodbye to my class is always difficult, but they are very ready to move on and become juniors. They should feel very proud of themselves.

I feel thoroughly spoilt! The delicious cupcakes and chocolates have helped me keep going through a three-day classroom move and the gorgeous flowers and plants have made my house look very cheerful. I love the fact that one of my gifts has paid for a child to be educated in another country. I have also piled up some good summer reading with the vouchers that I received - so kind and thoughtful of you to get together to do that! With the lovely candles I received I should be relaxing very soon!

The special teacher gifts will be very useful next year and I shall wear my badge with pride! I intend to write lots of inspirational ideas in my gorgeous new notebook too! My cards will stay up all summer - it is lovely to feel so appreciated.

You will be pleased to know that I have shared *some* of my chocolates!

I hope you all have a happy holiday (I'm sure the sun will make an appearance soon!) and I'll look forward to seeing you all in September.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Here we all are - as sailors!

Sailors!

Once on board HMS Beagle we sang some sea shanties, danced some jigs, had naps in our hammocks, went in the crow's nest and looked out for creatures, before eating our tasty (and not so tasty) biscuits!

Ship builders

Did you know that there were about 75 sailors on board HMS Beagle? We worked out that there is 1/3 of that number of children in class two (more maths!!)

We decided that if we made our HMS Beagle 1/3 of the size, we would have to make it 9m long and 3m wide. More problem solving! We did a great job of it!

Ship's biscuits and Shrewsbury biscuits, part two

We have done so much maths today in class 2! We started off with measuring weights of ingredients and we had to think very carefully about the equipment that we needed. A ruler wouldn't help!

We had to look at the recipe carefully and we had to halve the ingredients so we had enough to go round. More tricky maths!!

How big was HMS Beagle? (More maths!!)

We found out that HMS Beagle was about 28m long and 8m wide. We used trundle wheels on the playground to get the size right. We could see exactly how big the ship was.

Ship builders!

After cooking we all became ship builders. We had to use our measuring skills to make scale models of HMS Beagle. It was really hard!

We learned that it was better to measure together.

We learned to listen carefully to instructions and start at the bottom. We also has to remember to get the depth right as well as the length.

We then had to get the scale of the masts right. It was really challenging and only a few got to the end, but we learned loads in the process!

Sailor's grub!

We needed to get provisions ready for our voyage on HMS Beagle! Ellie-Mae and Nicholas made hard tack (ship's biscuits) and everyone else made Shrewsbury biscuits. Only the captain and Charles Darwin would eat these as they had more expensive ingredients than hard tack.