After Vanya left I asked the children to write down an account of their first session in their special ‘Virtually There’ notebook which they had made and were very proud of. They described what they had done and their favourite part of the session. A good opportunity for cross curricular integration here with some recount writing.

Here is an example of the children’s thoughts on their first session. More can be seen in the class journal page.

The main message that I got from their pieces of writing was that they really enjoyed their first session. We didn’t have an online session with Vanya on week two but we had plenty to be working on.

I asked the children to ask their parents or grandparents if they had been a pupil at any of the old schools. Many had been so the children asked them questions that had been raised during our visit to the old school. They children found out lots of information and wrote it into their history copies. They shared their information with the class and really enjoyed bringing back the information.

I got a photo of the inside of one of the classrooms in the old school from another teacher in the school. The children thought it was very interesting as they could compare it with their own classroom. The photo also included Santa and they remarked on the way he was dressed differently to now.

We also decided that we would measure the perimeter of our own school. Firstly the children sketched a rough floor plan of our school. We then got a trundle wheel to measure the length of the various walls around the school. When we returned to class the children made a drawing of the floor plan of the school with the measurements in their booklets. Here we have an example of bringing the strand unit measures to life and making it relevant. We will do some more work on drawing plans to scale in the near future.