This week has been a fun filled adventure to learn about our Book Week book ‘Here We Are’. We’ve loved reading the story, learning about our special character (the Inuit) and composing our own music about the sea, land and sky with our special visitor, Natasha, who is a composer and cellist.
We’ve done a brilliant job on our challenges as well…
Orange: writing facts about Inuit life such as the food they eat and the clothing they wear.
Yellow: to add some additional facts to our polar explorers book – we’ve been using our new digraphs such as ch, sh and ng to write words such as penguin, chick and fish.
Blue: We’ve been playing our Inuit subtraction game and practising writing our equations using the take away/minus sign –
Red: to use plasticine to create polar objects such as animals, igloos, snow mobiles and boats.
Purple: we’ve been recreating our sky, land and sea themed music and sharing it with our friends using instruments and also adding our own movement to this music.
Green: to use construction to make a vehicle for our Inuits to travel on, we’ve also been using construction to make polar homes and scientific research bases like the ones we learnt about in Antarctica.
It’s now time to celebrate this incredibly busy half term and all the wonderful things we have achieved. This has been a term where we’ve seen amazing progress in the children’s learning across all areas. They’ve been using their words to express their feelings more confidently, finding solutions to problems, challenging themselves with activities that they’ve never done before and embracing the opportunity to be more independent. We hope you have a wonderful February half term!
When we come back we will begin a new topic – Animal Kingdom!
We will launch our topic learning about pets and thinking about what animals would make good pets or not so good pets. Our challenges will be:
Orange (adult-led): imaginative writing about what would happen if an elephant was in your bedroom/crocodile was in the kitchen/giraffe was in your living room.
Red (Creative focus): to paint a picture of an animal that would be a good pet to live in a house and one that wouldn’t be such a good pet.
Blue (Mathematics focus): To sort animals into different groups and explain their reasoning and to challenge ourselves to write labels for these different categories.
Yellow (Writing focus): To use reading books to hunt for tricky words.
Green (Technology focus): To use technology to play instruments such as a piano or drum set.
Purple (Physical development focus): To create animal images using chalks on the pavements outside.
Our focus in phonics will be the ‘ai’ and ‘ee’ digraphs and our focus in mathematics will be using mathematical language to compare animals by height and length.
Important Notices
- Snuggle with a Story: This will be taking place in our first week back from 8.45 – 9.30am.
MONDAY – Pumpkins, TUESDAY – Acorns, WEDNESDAY – Sunflowers.
Children are to be dropped off at their classroom to be registered and parents will be able to assemble outside the library underneath the sheltered entrance to our school. We will then bring the children to meet you and our library session will begin. We kindly ask parents to support children to put books back where they came from in order to keep our library beautiful and tidy.
- Encouraging independence in the mornings: Self-care is an important aspect of our early years curriculum and it would be wonderful if parents and carers could encourage children to place their own books in the trays outside their classrooms and have their water bottles ready to place in the box provided so children can regularly drink water throughout the school day – thank you again for everything you do!
- School Trip: We are excited to announce that on Thursday 19th of March we will be visiting Shepreth Wildlife Park as part of our topic learning. We will be sending home permission letters this Friday (14th of February). We will need some parent volunteers to support this trip by accompanying a small group of the children in your child’s class, if you are willing and available please contact your child’s class teacher.