What does it mean to be healthy?

This half term, our priority is settling the children back into school and ensuring that they are happy and secure. Alongside this, the children will become experts at staying healthy & hygienic!

We will be exploring how to keep our bodies healthy, including finding out about the five food groups and why they are important. Whilst exploring healthy foods, we will use our observation and sketching skills to sketch the cross section of different fruits and vegetables. We will also use potatoes to explore printing different patterns. In Science, we will learn about things we can do to keep ourselves healthy and we will explore what good hygiene looks like. In History, we will explore the life of Florence Nightingale and the impact she had on hospitals, focusing on Scutari Hospital.

Please take a look at our half termly overview below to find out more about what we will be learning.

This week, our highlight was definitely making our healthy sub rolls! We learnt how to be hygienic and used these skills to prepare our working space. We chose healthy ingredients, including foods from different food groups, and prepared these to use in our sub rolls. They were delicious and we really enjoyed eating them at the end!

Next week, we will be making our healthy sandwich or sub rolls and to help us with this learning, we have been learning about the five food groups. We worked in teams and learnt the names of the different groups before sorting different foods. We also discussed why each group is important for our bodies. Ask us about the five food groups at home!

In Science, we have been observing our seeds over a three week period. It has been really interesting to see how they have grown (or not!) and why this may be. Through this observation, we came to the conclusion that plants need water & sunlight to grow. Now our cress is fully grown, we have put it into our woodlands to see if any animals will eat it. We will let you know!

In Science, we are beginning to explore what plants need to grow. We had a discussions about what we think they might need, using our prior learning, and we looked at the plants that are growing in our school grounds. We then set up five plant pots with cress seeds and we will observe how these grow over the next few weeks. One seed will be given soil, water & sunlight but the others will all have something missing. Check back on here to see what happens!

In ICT, we have been learning to program BeeBots by giving a precise set of instructions. We can now use the control functions forwards, backwards, left and right. Our challenge was to get the BeeBot to move around the vegetable patch to harvest the different vegetables. We were very resilient when it didn't quite go to plan and in our teams, we problem solved to give the correct controls.

In Science, we have been exploring plants & trees in our school grounds. We have learnt to identify and name common wild plants, including some that we were already familiar with. We are also becoming tree experts as we learnt to identify trees by their leaves and other properties. We can't wait to see which trees are evergreen & which are deciduous as we move into Autumn! Perhaps we could hunt for trees on our way home.

This week, we have started reading George's Marvellous Medicine. This links into our topic as we are talking about medicine, including how it can make us feel better but also that taking the wrong medicine can make us feel poorly. The children have really enjoyed the book so far. This was clear to see as the children wrote amazing sentences when asked to describe George. In the book, George makes medicine for his grumpy Grandma to get his own back for all the mean things she says to him, so we decided to make our own 'medicine' using all sorts of ingredients including milk, sugar and toothpaste. As you can imagine, they had lots of fun doing this!