Week 6

This week was our special RE week. We spent lots of time learning about the events of Holy Week and trying to understand why Easter is such an important time for Christians. We had lots of fun acting out Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, making an Easter garden and finding out the significance of the cross on a hot cross bun. Our favourite part was when we got to eat them!

This week was also the week of our very first school trip. We were so excited to spend the day at Queen Elizabeth Country Park! 
 

We ended the week with a special surprise… we found lots of little eggs hidden all around the school! When we opened them we found a letter inside each one! We put all of the letters in the right order and noticed that they spelled out a secret message: HAPPY EASTER DOLPHINS!

Once we got back to class we thought we heard a strange sound coming from the cupboard… it was Easter eggs, and enough for everyone! I wonder who could have left them there?

Week 5

This week we continued our work on number bonds by using numicon to see how many number bonds of 10 we could find. Numicon is a fantastic piece of maths equipment that helps us to count, add, subtract and see patterns - we’ll be using it a lot during our time at school!

We then moved on to learning about doubles. We talked about what ‘double’ means and had fun trying to find doubles in pictures and spotting ‘doubles’ and ‘not doubles’. We then made our own doubles patterns on butterfly wings.

Our maths learning didn’t stop there! We continued to explore number bonds during discovery time by using double-sided counters to make pictures. We had to use ten counters and then count up how many red and how many yellow counters made up our picture. We then tried to say this as a sentence stem, for example: ‘10 is made from 6 and 4. 6 and 4 makes 10.’

We’re reading and learning so many new words during phonics lessons, it’s hard to keep up! We’re getting so good at spotting capital letters, full stops, tricky words and digraphs that we can even read full sentences now. 
 

Our writing is really coming on, too. On top of our daily guided writing and handwriting sessions, we’ve started having one weekly chance to write independently as well. We do this after our Big Write on a Thursday. This week we tried writing words, phrases or sentences about a beautiful sunflower. 
 

We’re even writing sentences during handwriting practice!

In discovery time this week we have been making shadow puppets and performing shows in our shadow theatre, creating recipes in the mud kitchen and re-telling familiar stories in the storytelling area.

On Wednesday we were visited by Lucy, a real dentist! She spoke to us about the importance of looking after our teeth and gave us some top tips for keeping them clean and healthy. We were even given a special mirror, toothbrush, chart and some disclosing tablets to use at home. Thank you, Lucy!

Finally, we enjoyed looking at all of the amazing homework projects that you have been busy making at home. I really enjoyed seeing how imaginative the Dolphins are - your imaginary woodland creatures are fantastic and would definitely give The Gruffalo a run for his money! Thank you for supporting your children with their learning at home.

Week 4

This week has been very exciting! One of the best parts was when we were visited by Rocksteady on Tuesday. They showed us lots of different instruments and even gave some of us a chance to play them. We had so much fun singing along to ‘We Will Rock You’ as a whole school… look closely and you might recognise the pianist and the bass guitarist!

Another brilliant part of our week was on Wednesday when we got the chance to perform our very first class assembly to our parents. We were very nervous, but with lots of courage and team work we did it! I am so proud of each of the children and I hope that you are, too. Thank you so much for coming along to support them.

We have really enjoyed maths this week. We found out that the number 10 can be made with different pairs of numbers and learned that these special pairs are called number bonds. We used tens frames, multilink and numicon throughout the week to investigate different ways to find and represent these number bonds.

In phonics we have been reading lots of longer words, like farmer, morning and waiting. These words are tricky to read but we are getting more confident every day. Some of us have even started to use these cards in our play during discovery time.

We had a very important job to do this week, but I can’t really say any more because it would spoil the surprise…. All will be revealed on Sunday!

We’ve been continuing to work hard in handwriting lessons and look forward to having a go at writing some of the words we’ve been learning in phonics. 
 

In discovery time this week we thought about making traps for some of the animals in The Gruffalo. Some of us designed and made traps for the owl, fox and snake, others for the Gruffalo and some even made a trap for the poor little mouse!

Finally, we all came to school on Friday in non-uniform, with crazy hair or wearing something red in order to raise money for Comic Relief. It was great to see everyone enjoying themselves so much whilst raising money for such a worthy cause. Thank you for donating!

Week 3

After getting excited about seeing signs of Spring last week, we were amazed to see snow on Wednesday! Us Dolphins are never put off by the weather, so we loved taking the opportunity to explore outside. One of the best bits was splashing in the muddy puddles after the snow had all melted!

This week our maths lessons have been all about the number 7. We have thought about which numbers are bigger and smaller than 7 and have learned that we can break it up into two parts. We used the numberblocks to make 7 in different ways such as 5 & 2, 3 & 4 and 6 & 1. We enjoyed singing a song about 7 cheeky little ducks, too!

In Discovery Time we have been continuing to learn about habitats. We thought about different habitats around the world and even had a look at them on Google Earth - we were amazed to see how much water there is! The children thought about whether the Gruffalo would like to have a go at living somewhere else for a change, but decided that the woods is definitely the best place for him. We had lots of fun making him a new woodland habitat out of different materials.

We have been looking at lots of different Axel Scheffler characters this week and had a go at making our favourite ones with play dough.

Our new library is now up and running and we had a wonderful time choosing a new book to take home. We even got a a chance to relax on the bean bags and listen to a story - I think this might become our favourite part of the week!

Week 2

This week we continued our outdoor learning by looking for signs of Spring. We found buds on trees, daffodils, crocuses and even some green leaves. We’re so excited that spring is here - it’ll be even better when the weather decides to warm up a bit!

We have more and more fun each week using our writing skills in class. This week we have been writing about woodland creatures, completing a name writing challenge for Mario and his friends and writing labels for our creations in our new ‘Creation Station’. We wrote speech bubbles for The Gruffalo and the mouse in guided writing and described a monster in our big write, too!

We continued to learn about different animals and their habitats during discovery time. We sorted animals into those who like living in snowy places, woodland, water and deserts. We enjoyed making junk model woodland creatures and even did a bit of spring cleaning in our home corner!

On Thursday we loved dressing up for world book day. We came to school dressed as our favourite book characters or in our cosiest pyjamas. We all looked incredible! We designed bookmarks and learned about how magical words can be when used to describe characters… but the best part of the day was when we had a go at drawing Superworm with Mrs Mannie! 
 

Week 1

What a great first week back we have had in Dolphins Class!

The week began with a mysterious letter… we were so excited that we had been visited by someone, but who was it? We had lots of ideas about who it might be and worked hard to write them down. Some of us thought that it might be an animal like a baby hedgehog or a fox, but most of us thought that it could be the Gruffalo!

Meanwhile, outside in the playground, some children found more notes… we decided to investigate the scene and looked for clues to help us figure out who had been in our playground. We found a mouse and lots of muddy footprints!

We were very excited to use our new story telling area this week. We all loved using the little characters to re-tell a familiar story.

We are becoming more and more confident with our writing. This week, we wrote words and phrases to describe the characters in The Gruffalo. We used words like ‘orange’, ‘purple prickles’, ‘tongue’, ‘sharp teeth’, ‘hairy’ and ‘knees’. Some of us wanted to write down what had happened in class this week, so wrote ‘The Gruffalo came’ and ‘The Gruffalo did it.’

We have started to learn about different habitats. This week we learned that different animals live in different kinds of places. Some are cold, some hot, some full of sand or snow, some full of lush, green plants. We went onto the field to explore our immediate environment and found lots of evidence to show that our field is a great habitat for lots of animals to live in.

In maths we met some new Numberblocks - 7, 8, 9 and 10! We thought about how these numbers can be described as ‘5 and a bit’, and had fun putting 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 on top of 5 to make new numbers to 10.

We then put objects onto tens frames to see how the numbers 9 and 10 can be arranged in different ways.

We started a new music topic this week. This half term we will be learning about pitch. We found out that sounds can be high or low. We saw that the smallest bars on a xylophone made high sounds and the biggest ones made low sounds. We used big and small Numberblocks to remind us which was which as we played our own tunes.

We are continuing to practise our reading and writing skills every day in guided reading. We are very good at organising ourselves now - working with adults as well as independently to read for pleasure, read with a grown up, manipulate play dough and complete a writing task.

On Tuesday we were very excited about pancake day, so we decided to make a pretend play pancake making station! Some of the children worked together to make pancakes for me to eat… I was given some rather interesting flavour combinations! I hope that you all enjoyed eating and making delicious pancakes at home, too.