Week 7

We’ve made it through our first whole term at school - well done, Dolphins! We really enjoyed spending this week with each other. We’ve been singing songs, wrapping presents, writing cards, painting clay decorations, building marble runs, opening presents from the PTA, making muddy Christmas potions, sitting around a campfire and lots more!

Time for a well-earned rest now - Merry Christmas, Dolphins!

Week 6

What a busy week we’ve had! The highlight was performing our Nativity play again. We performed twice for our parents and also put on a special performance for some of the residents of Pear Tree Court and the children from Catherington Pre-School. You can be extremely proud of your children - they are all superstars!

It really feels as though Christmas has arrived at Catherington. The children in Dolphins Class helped to decorate our home corner. We have a Christmas tree, tinsel and some of the children made paper chains to hang around the rest of the classroom.

We have been very busy writing special messages to each other and posting them in our class postbox. Some letters to Santa have made their way in there, too!

Some of the children have really enjoyed using their imaginations to play with our new North Pole tray! Elsa, Anna and Olaf are there as well as lots of excited children, Santa and some polar bears. 

We enjoyed having Mary, Joseph and their donkey to stay in our classroom for the day on Thursday. Reverend Joy from Blendworth Church told us all about them and we did a really good job of looking after them.

In maths this week we have been learning all about adding one more to different numbers. We built towers with multilink cubes and then added one more, as well as using five frames to see what it would look like when we added one more counter to a number.

In RE this week we thought about celebrations. We talked about how people celebrate when a new baby is born and shared with each other how we celebrate our own birthdays. We celebrated the birth of our very own babies in Dolphins Class! We named them Rosie and John and have been looking after them very carefully. We learned that the birth of Jesus is a very special time for Christians and made images from the Nativity story with sand.

In PE we put lots of our learning from this half term together to make jumping, hopping and rolling routines in small groups. 

We loved sharing our home learning with each other on Thursday. Everyone has worked so hard at home to learn about different nocturnal animals - what wonderful projects!

On Friday we had a very exciting day. We met Father Christmas and a unicorn, ate Christmas dinner, wore Christmas jumpers and had an amazing time visiting some Christmas activity stalls. What a week… have a good rest this weekend, Dolphins!

Week 5

We have been working so hard on our Nativity play this week. We wore our costumes for the first time on Thursday and performed it to Seahorses Class. We were nervous, but it was lots of fun! We can’t wait to perform it again next week.

As part of our learning about light and dark, we found out about the Hindu festival Diwali. We learned that it’s a festival of lights and watched a shadow puppet show all about Rama and Sita. In Discovery Time we made Rangoli patterns using numicon, chalk and 2D shapes. We drew Mehndi hands and made our own shadow puppets using lolly sticks and coloured paper. In Outdoor Explorers we collected colourful leaves and sticks to make a class Rangoli on the field.

We’re continuing to enjoy writing anywhere and everywhere. Our message centre has been made even more exciting with our magical mark making box! It’s full of fun things to write and draw with - thank you to our amazing PTA for buying three of them for us with the money they’ve been raising. 

One of our favourite parts of the week was on Friday when our playground turned to ice! We loved breaking up the ice in the water table and seeing what happened when we dropped it on the ground.

Week 4

This week we learned our final graphemes for this term in phonics (nk, ng, th and sh). We’re working so hard at remembering all of these new sounds and are beginning to really understand how we can use them to make and read words.

Some of us applied these skills during Discovery Time, writing signs for the dens and bridges we made outside.

In maths this week we’ve been learning more about the composition of numbers, particularly the numbers 4 and 5. We used paper cut-outs as well as paint to explore how many different ways we can arrange each number.

We also consolidated our learning from last week by making pictures with different 2D shapes.

Some of us continued our learning about light and dark by experimenting with different materials to see which ones reflect light and which ones don’t.

Our focus in Drawing Club this week was Jack and the Beanstalk. We’ve been enjoying Drawing Club so much that we decided we wanted to make our very own stories during Discovery Time, too! We made little books and wrote inside them. Some of us re-told stories we already knew, whilst others used their imaginations to make up something new. We loved telling these stories to our friends.

We learned another new trick for our trick boxes on Friday. It’s called Stand Tall, and is a good trick to use if we want to make ourselves feel confident. We had a go at standing up tall with our backs straight, chest out and heads held high. We practised saying ‘I am great and I can achieve anything!’ as loudly as we could… it made us all feel amazing, even the adults.

Woodwork Wednesday is becoming one of our favourite days of the week… just a few more children to go and then we’ve all completed our hammer and nails training! We can’t wait to move on to screws and screwdrivers next.

Week 3

We’ve had another busy week in Dolphins Class! We’ve been thinking a lot about light and dark and learned that some animals like to come out at night. We learned about light sources and experimented with light in different ways - shining torches through different materials, mixing colours and making rainbows with crystals. We enjoyed making rainbows with chalks, too.

We have been practising name writing a lot in class and had lots of fun using our name writing skills to make our very own lanyards! We know that adults in our school wear lanyards to keep us safe, so we were excited to be able to make our own.

In PE we had another go at using the jumping skills we learned last week. Then we talked about how to jump on one leg! We practised hopping around the room and decided that it’s much harder than jumping on two legs.

With a partner, we made up a jumping routine that included hops and jumps, then performed our routines to the rest of the class.

In maths we have been learning about shape. We looked at different shapes and talked about their properties, then sorted some shapes into groups of circles and triangles. We found out that even if a shape is a different size or colour, it’s still the same shape. We tried turning some shapes, too - we found it very funny when Mr Rush ended up with an upside-down body!

Week 2

This week we spent lots of time learning about Remembrance Day. We thought about why poppies are special flowers and found out that they help us to remember people who have died in wars. We learned the word ‘memorial’ and enjoyed making some special pieces of remembrance artwork - poppy fields made with paint, sponges and toilet rolls and a wreath made with tissue paper.

In drawing club this week, we had fun with Roadrunner and the Coyote and used our imaginations to think about how the Coyote might be able to catch Roadrunner! On Friday we talked about what different accidents the Coyote might have… we really made each other giggle with our ideas!

Some of us had our first taste of woodwork this week. We learned some rules to keep us safe and then set to work being creative! First, we’re learning how to use a hammer and nails to make things with balsa wood. Once we’re confident with these skills we’ll learn how to use some different tools.

This half term in PE we’re learning about different ways to travel. This week, we enjoyed jumping in lots of directions. We had to think carefully about how to send our bodies straight up into the air and then had a go at jumping forwards, too.
When we have PE in the hall, we always take our shoes and socks off, so we had to practise taking our own shoes off and putting them back on again at the end of the lesson. We were very organised and managed to keep track of where our own things were… no mean feat when you’re four!

We’re working hard in our phonics lessons to sound out and blend words to read them. We practised this during discovery time, using bottle top graphemes to make and read words.

Week 1

We’ve had a lovely time this week getting back together with our friends and building on the relationships we started to form before half term. In discovery time, we’ve built safe spaces for animals to hide in on bonfire night, bought and sold fruit and vegetables in a harvest shop, worked together to make giant pictures and helped to feed and clean the school guinea pigs.

Every morning, we enjoy a phonics lesson and a guided reading session. During phonics we practise reading graphemes we’ve already learned as well as learning new ones. This week, we learned ss, ff, ll and j. We’ve also started practising spelling every day. We work hard to segment the sounds in a word to figure out which graphemes to write.

We’re getting really good at doing independent activities in guided reading when we’re not reading with an adult, too!

In maths this week we’ve been reading and writing numbers, matching numbers to amounts and going on a number 5 treasure hunt!

We have learned a lot about bonfire night this week. We read a story all about Guy Fawkes and his plot to destroy the Houses of Parliament and had lots of fun using crayons and black paper to make firework pictures. We learned a special song to help us remember the 5th November and found out how to stay safe around fireworks and bonfires in PSHE (thanks for the top tips, Fireman Sam!).