Understanding of the World
This week, we have been learning about the Hindu festival of Diwali. We were so excited to look at the pictures and story books. We read the story of Rama and Sita and learnt how Diwali is called the festival of light. We made our own Diya lamps by moulding clay into a bowl shape. We will wait for it to dry and then will decorate them. We also made some very yummy coconut barfi sweets which we enjoyed eating later on in the day. We decorated rangoli patterns and made our own using numicon. We made Diwali cards for each other and also decorated our hands in mehndi patterns.
Maths
This week’s Maths focus has been on 2D shapes and their properties. We have compared circles, squares and triangles and talked about how many sides and corners they have. We thought about the difference between a curved side and a straight side and what happens if we rotate or make the shape bigger. Is it still the same shape? We talked about how 2D shapes are flat and how we know the difference between a 2D and 3D shape. Finally we decided to make our own shape pictures. We thought about where to place each shape and which way to put it.
Art
Our shape work in Maths inspired us to look at the artwork of Wassily Kandinsky who was a famous artist that based his art on colour and shape. We learnt a little bit about the history of Kandinsky and then we studied some of his artwork. We talked about the shapes and colours we could see. We decided to make our own version of his famous concentric circles art and painted our own circle shapes onto a square base. It helped us developed our fine motor skills too!
