Week 6

This week we learned all about special things in RE. We talked about objects, clothes and places that are special to us and realised that we all have different ideas about what might be special. We thought about why churches are important to Christians and synagogues are important to Jews. We wrote about our own special places and made Torah Scrolls with tea-stained paper, art straws and whiteboard pens.

In PE we finished our travelling topic by learning how to do different kinds of rolls. We practised stretched out rolls as well as curled up rolls, then had lots of fun putting our different ways of travelling together to use on, under and around the apparatus.

Our special helper Mrs Eastman has been giving us lots of fun activities to do! On Tuesday we helped her tidy up our planting area, which had become a bit overgrown with weeds! We weeded the pots and cut back the daffodils. Then we planted some lettuce seeds. We’re going to look after our seeds really well so that we can eat the lettuce once it has grown.

On Wednesday we made some flapjacks! We mixed together oats, nut-free butter, honey, raisins and chocolate chips and then put them into cupcake cases. After they had set in the fridge we took them home to enjoy… messy and delicious!

In Outdoor Explorers we investigated the field. We talked about the changes we expect to see from season to season, then set about looking for signs that summer is on its way. We found lots of colourful plants and signs of life… our field really is a beautiful place!

Week 5

In maths this week we learned a new word: SUBTRACT. We found out that this word means ‘take away’, and that when we subtract our numbers get smaller. We read a story called The Shopping Basket and tried to keep track of how many objects the little boy had left in his basket. Then we played games with ice creams, spiders and doughnuts to practise our subtraction skills.

In Discovery Time we put our adding skills into practice by fishing for numbers! We had to find stones, magnetic letters and pieces of numicon in the water tray and add them together.

In phonics we have been reading words that end with -est, -ed and -ing. We have been listening to the differences in how these word endings sound and matching them to pictures. We have also practised reading words with tricky blends during discovery time by digging for hidden pirate treasure in the sand pit.

This week we helped to create our own tuff trays to play with. We used chalk, loose materials and vehicles to make a transport tuff tray! We had lots of fun making roads for cars to travel on and even thought about how to build bridges and waterways for boats to travel under and through.

One of our favourite things to do this week has been to spend time in our new outdoor writing area. We have loved being able to write, draw and colour with our friends whilst still enjoying the fresh air and sunshine. We even used this area to write and deliver secret messages to each other on Friday afternoon!

Week 4

We have really enjoyed using our maths skills this week. In our taught lessons we have practised using die frames to represent different numbers. We noticed that if we use two frames we can make numbers up to 10. We sang about sausages popping and banging and placed counters on our frames to show how many we had left.

We also added two numbers together to pay for our snack, investigated how many ways we can make the number 6 and used 2D shapes to make different vehicles.

In our guided writing lessons we used last week’s Book Talk book to write postcards. We imagined we were in Emma Jane’s Aeroplane and wrote to our families from one of her exciting destinations.

On Wednesday we had a wonderful assembly! Mrs Islam came into school to teach us all about the Muslim faith and how she and her family celebrated Eid this year. We all learned so much and even got to see (and touch!) her special prayer mat and hear her read words from The Quran. 
 

We enjoyed doing lots of different challenges during Discovery Time this week and even solved problems for some tiny little people! It was difficult to read their speech bubbles, but we worked very hard to sound out the words we didn’t know and then helped our little friends get to where they needed to go.

Week 3

This week was full of new experiences! On Tuesday we were visited by a scooter expert who showed us how to ride a scooter safely as well as letting us have a go at performing some tricks.

We have continued our transport topic and learned all about an amazing woman called Amelia Earhart. We found out about her aeroplane, Canary, and learned that she broke the records for the fastest, highest and furthest female aviator until she mysteriously disappeared on an attempt to fly around the world. We were so inspired that we decided to make our own junk model aeroplanes.

In music we made music with different instruments and started to think about how we can work together to make our own storm composition.

We were introduced to some cute little creatures this week… Bee-Bots! They’re little robots that can be programmed to move around. We had fun experimenting with the controls and figuring out how to send them on their own journeys across a road mat.

In Discovery Time we read messages from explorers and tried hard to make them the snack they’d requested in the mud kitchen.

On Friday we had a wonderful day learning all about the Coronation. Mrs Mannie taught us so much in a special worship (did you know that the Coronation Crown weighs as much as two bags of flour?!), then we spent the rest of the day making paper chains, flags and crowns, singing songs and we even had a picnic lunch with the rest of the school in the hall. We really felt part of the Coronation celebrations!

Week 2

This week we really got stuck into our transport topic. We used our construction area to build different types of transport like cars, boats, trains and even a submarine! We loved buying our tickets at the ticket office and then travelling somewhere new with our friends.

We have also been looking at how transport has changed over time. We learned about the past and thought about things that might have happened before we were born. Then we sorted pictures of old and new transport, comparing what things looked like in the past compared to now. Some of us noticed that even photographs looked different in the past… what a funny colour they were!

We have been practising our phonics skills by trying to make labels for different modes of transport. Can you spot the words tractor, car, bus and racing car?

This week we learned a new Trickbox trick (one of my favourites!) called Win Win. This trick is all about compromise - we read a story about how to share and then had a go at putting the trick into practice on the field in Outdoor Explorers. 
 

In music we continued to think about the weather. We listened to ‘April Showers’ from Bambi and showed how the music changed to match the weather by moving ribbons up, down and all around!

Maths has been a lot of fun this week, too. We learned more about the number 6 and worked hard to spot doubles in different numbers. We noticed that we can spot doubles in the numbers 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 but not in the numbers 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9. We remembered that the difference between these numbers is the fact that some have even tops and others have odd blocks! Then we practised counting up to and beyond 20 using numicon and special city tower templates.

Our favourite part of the week was probably PE on Monday because we got to use the big apparatus for the first time! We loved travelling in different ways along the benches, jumping off the tables and climbing up and sliding down the wall bars. 
 

Week 1

It has been so lovely to have all of the Dolphins back together after our two week break.  We have been so busy learning lots of new things.

We continue to have daily phonics lessons in which we practise all of the phonemes and tricky words we have learned so far. We have started to read words with difficult blends in them like -lp, -mp, -nt and -st. We are enjoying having a go at writing different sentences in our handwriting lessons, and we have really got the hang of sharing books together during guided reading. It’s wonderful to see the children growing in confidence with their reading and writing skills - one of the greatest perks of the job!

In maths this week we have been counting up to and beyond 20. We noticed that the numbers 1-9 appear like a pattern every time we count past a ten. We have used tens frames to help us count bigger numbers, matched number cards to pictures and played a fun game called Race to 20.

We even used some of our maths skills during Outdoor Explorers on Tuesday. We had to collect four, five or six different things from the field and put them in order from smallest to biggest.

In our PE lesson on Monday we were visited by Mr Porter from the Ageas Bowl. He spoke to us about cricket and what a fun sport it is to play. Then he took us onto the field for our very own special cricket lesson! We practised bowling, catching and batting - it was a lot of fun.

We have started a new topic in music all about the weather. We reminded ourselves of the names of the different instruments we have in school and had a go at playing some of them in different ways - loudly, quietly, quickly and slowly. Then we thought about which instruments sound like different types of weather.

This half term we will be learning all about transport. We kicked off our new topic this week by thinking about where different places are in the world and how we might get there. Some of the children in Dolphins class have been on holiday to India, Greece and Lanzarote. We looked at where these places are in the world and learned that flying in an aeroplane was the quickest way to get there. We have been investigating what materials make the best boats (it wasn’t cardboard!), what dens would be best for a traveller to rest in and sent messages to each other using paper aeroplanes.