Week 3

This week we continued our artist study. We learned some facts about Axel Scheffler and found out that he was born in Germany. We learned what the word ‘illustrator’ means, and found out that Axel has illustrated over 120 books! He works very closely with one of our favourite authors, Julia Donaldson.

Throughout the week we had lots of fun drawing some of his famous characters and making our own picture books. It’s fun being an illustrator!

Some of us made Axel Scheffler characters using junk modelling materials and some of us made our own Squash and a Squeeze house big enough to fit the old woman and all of her animals!

In maths we spent lots of time investigating different ways to make the number 7. By the end of the week we were really good at this, and applied our learning by singing a song about 7 little ducks. We had to figure out how many ducks we had left if a certain number had flown away.

On Friday we enjoyed making bracelets with Mrs Mannie. We had to make sure that we had an equal number of beads as our friend. It was interesting comparing the lengths of our bracelets to check whether we had succeeded or not!

In woodwork, some of the children decided to make boats! We used saws, screwdrivers, drills and hammers. After we had built our amazing boats, we tested them to see if they could float… they were able to float, but we couldn’t get them to stay upright!

We are getting really good at applying our love of writing to all areas of our learning. We had a great time this week building, playing and imagining with our friends… and adding signs along the way!

Week 2

For the first time in phonics this week we wrote a dictation sentence. From now on, we will write one of these sentences every week. It takes lots of concentration to listen to each of the words, hear the sounds in each word, match them to the correct grapheme, write the words down in the correct order, include finger spaces, spell tricky words accurately and include a capital letter and full stop… but we did amazingly! 

In PE we started a new unit of work. This half term we will be learning new ball skills on the playground outside. For our first lesson, we practised moving balls along the ground with our hands and feet. We had to control the balls carefully to stop them from rolling too far away. Our favourite part was rolling our balls along the ground to our partner - this was harder than it looked!

We have been learning about different habitats this week. We learned that a habitat is a place where an animal lives, and talked about how animals are adapted to suit the habitat in which they live. We made different environments in a tuff tray and matched animals to the place they’d thrive in.

Then we focused in on one habitat in particular - the woods. We found out about which animals live in the woods and painted pictures of them.

Some of the children noticed that the snow in our tuff tray habitat looked like magic dust! They had lots of fun making a fairy house in our small world, decorating it with the fairy dust and then writing messages to the fairies to invite them to live there.

On Thursday the whole school celebrated World Book Day. We dressed up as our favourite characters or in pyjamas and enjoyed reading all sorts of different books together throughout the day. At the end of the day some of our grown-ups were able to come to school to read with us - it was such a lovely day!

Week 1

We have really caught the writing bug this week! On Tuesday, we found secret messages in our room from some mysterious creatures… we had to read the clues and look at the footprints to try and figure out which creatures had written to us. Then we wrote our guesses down. Some of our guesses were dinosaur, grizzly bear, snake, owl, wolf and bird.

In our Big Write, we tried to write words and phrases to describe the different characters in The Gruffalo story. We used our grapheme mats to write words like ‘prickles’, ‘claws’, ‘wings’ and ‘long tail’. 

Some of us were so inspired by our Gruffalo writing that we decided to re-tell the story using puppets! We’ll keep these puppets in our book corner throughout the half term so that everyone has the chance to make their own Gruffalo play with their friends.

We practised writing on phoneme frames in our guided reading lessons. We sounded out words to match different pictures and worked hard to fit the sounds into each part of the frame. 

In maths we have been learning about the composition of the numbers 9 and 10. We worked hard to find different ways to make these numbers and used the words ‘part’ and ‘whole’ to describe what we found.

We also continued to investigate what happens when we add one more to a number and learned that we can make the numbers 6-10 by adding 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 to the number 5. One of the children demonstrated this perfectly using multilink cubes!

This half term we will be learning all about forests. We began this week in outdoor explorers by finding out about different types of tree. We collected different leaves and then used crayons to make leaf rubbings. It was lots of fun to see all of the different colours, shapes and textures.

We continued to learn new skills in our woodwork area. Just over half of the children have now learned how to use all of our tools, including hammers, hand drills, screwdrivers and the Japanese pull saw.