WEEK COMMENCING 29TH JAN – SPRING 1 2024

On Monday we learnt our new sound ‘ur’. We looked at different words that we know of with this sound in and came up with ‘fur’, ‘surf’, ‘hurt’ and ‘burn’. We also practised our tricky words, we have been playing different games to learn these, such as bingo, memory games and saying them in different voices.

We learnt facts about the remaining animal types, reptiles, amphibians and birds. This has been so helpful when we have been categorising the different animals in our provision and we can explain why we think an animal belongs to a certain class. Challenge your children to retrieve a fact they have learnt about an animal type! We have a safari and jungle tray set up for the children to explore different habitats and to role play being the different animals.

We have been looking at mass in Maths and exploring the word balance and what this means. We had a great conversation about how it means equal and the same as. We did a Maths investigation in small groups, where we had to balance the conkers and multi-link cubes and see how many of each were needed to weigh the same. We are getting good at using the correct vocabulary – such as ‘I know that the apple is heavier as it is lower on the scale, I know that the leaf is lighter because it is higher on the scale’.

We had lots of fun in the role play area, playing mums and dads, teachers and builders. The children were all getting into character and it was lovely to over hear some of their conversations.

On Tuesday our new sound was ‘ow’. We wrote it on each others backs, in the air and then did some beautiful writing on our whiteboards. We also unlocked lots of different sound passwords, and matched these to different words that had our magic sounds in.

We discussed the different job roles people have that work with animals and what they do and why they are important. We wrote down a list and then in our CHiL time we role played zoo keepers, making our own zoos and pretending to look after the animals.

In Maths we looked at what capacity means, explored full and empty, how many objects we would need to fill our containers and comparing this to other objects. We then continued to investigate this within our CHiL time.

Our forest schoolers were making assault courses for squirrels, we watched a video of how quick and clever they are and then we had to think about how we could challenge them and their sneaky ways.

On Wednesday we had our French, PE and Music.

Thursday we explored what different families look like and we created our own families out of the different role play characters. We talked about how some people look different within their families, and how families can be made up. Some people have 2 families, some people have grandparents who look after them, some people have two mummies and some people have 2 daddies. We talked about what our own families looked like and why they were special to us.

On Friday we continued looking at Lunar New Year – the year of the dragon. We immersed ourselves in the different celebrations, made lanterns with Chinese writing and we tried some delicious Chinese food. We loved the noodles, egg fried rice, sweet and sour sauce and prawn crackers. It was a big hit.

We have been making symmetrical butterflies with Miss Taylor, we have been reading ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ and we have been looking at the life cycle of caterpillars and butterflies.  

To finish off the week our new sound was ‘oi’. We looked at different words with our ‘oi’ sound in, such as ‘soil’, ‘boil’ and ‘point’.

We have finished writing our ‘What Am I’ poems – they are fantastic and I am so proud of the writing that the children have produced. We have used our phonic knowledge to sound out our words, beautiful handwriting, finger spaces and full stops. The children have been learning all about description and how important it is to give clear descriptions to help us imagine. I can’t wait for you all to read them. They will be in the children’s homework folders on the last Friday of Spring 1 term.

We had lots of beautiful weddings on Friday – the children have been organising this all themselves and it is so lovely to see everyone have such wonderful friendships.

What a great week and we are very excited for all of the things we have planned for our last week next week!

Miss S 😊