Frost last Saturday.It was bitterly cold this morning and indeed all day but the extreme dryness kept the frost away. We had quite a relaxed day in school again. The morning was spent doing more ice investigations. Today I was trying to get the children to design and carry out some simple experiments but my main goal was to develop the children's understanding and reasoning. Because of that I didn't simply want to give the children a set of instructions to follow and then record the results but provided them with a number of options that encouraged them to start to think about what they were investigating. So for a while it was rather chaotic but then the children began to come up with some good ideas and reasoning so I feel that the lesson was a success. In the afternoon half the class were out at the Gardening club so the rest of the children had Golden time though today I restricted the pcs to BBC science clips but they were just as happy exploring those rather than playing the usual simple games that our filter allows them to access. Another table of children were painting with watercolours and I could hear great conversations about the colours they were mixing and the pictures they were painting. One small child spent a long time simply playing with a tray full of ice cubes left over from the morning's investigations. Sadly in Year 2 there is not the time/space for much of this free play/investigation and the pressure is always on to cover the curriculum and focus on the requirements of the SATs tests which they will be sitting this year.
