Week Ending 17/03/23
Date: 15th Mar 2023 @ 9:29pm
Happy Friday! We have really enjoyed making Mother’s Day cards with the children this week. We hope you have a wonderful Mothering Sunday together this weekend. This week we have celebrated British Science Week. We have enjoyed watching our frogspawn hatch and turn into tadpoles. We fed them some boiled lettuce and watched them grow! On Friday we enjoyed celebrating British Science Week! We learnt all about the lifecycle of a frog and explored the habitat of our pond. Look out for more STEM challenges coming our way over the next few weeks!
- Tuesday 21stMarch- Imagine That Trip
- Wednesday 22ndMarch – Stay and Play from 2:30pm. The theme will be maths so there will be lots of number activities for you to enjoy with your child.
- Tuesday 28thMarch – Hedgehogs class assembly (9am) Dormice class assembly (9:30am). Please come to the Community Entrance and a member of staff will let you in.
Talking Point – The Future
We are so looking forward to visiting Imagine That next week. We will be able to continue our love of science and investigation by taking part in some exciting workshops. There is also lots of opportunities to be creative and further explore future careers in the role play street. Our Big Question this week was ‘What would you like to know about the future?” Encourage your child to share their ideas with you at home.
Little Wandle (Phonics)
Please see the downloadable attachment below to practise the sounds/words we have been learning this week. This will now be a regular feature for you to continue to support your child and consolidate what they have been learning in school that week.
Kinetic Letters
Kinetic Letters is the first thing we do each morning as the children come into school. We focus on teaching the children letter formation and aim that it becomes automatic as soon as possible. Please can you ensure that your child is in school by 8:45am so they are not missing out on this important lesson.
At parents evening, we spoke with lots of parents about the importance of fine motor skills on a child's writing journey. By enabling handwriting to become automatic, we remove that from a child's cognitive load when writing. This way they can focus on sentence construction and spelling. We do Kinetic Letters each more to give each child automaticity in their handwriting as soon as possible. You can help at home by encouraging play that strengthens little hands; playdough, tweezers, lacing, tying shoe laces, doing their own zip up, opening crisp packets/food boxes. In fact, developing independence and fine motor skills go hand in hand!
Dough Disco with Shonette is a firm favourite in the Early Years as it focuses on strengthening our fine motor skills making it easier for writing. Here is the link if you want to have a go at home. There’s a pirate one too! https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spread+the+happiness+dough+disco
Maths
This week we met number 9! We learnt that number 9 is easy to subitiise (recongise without counting) as it’s one less than 10. Can your child quickly show you nine fingers and explain why they could show the amount so quickly? We used numicon and unifix to find number bonds to 9 and recorded them in number sentences. We challenged the children to finx the number bonds systematically and try to spot what happens to the parts each time. We found out that number 9 is a square (3x3) like number 4 (2x2). I wonder if you can find any other square numbers with your child? Can you prove your findings using objects and then upload to Tapestry?
On Monday, we were so excited to come into school and find our new tadpole friends! The children made lots of great observations and enjoyed looking through non-fiction books about amphibians. We read the first few pages of ‘The Pirates Are Coming’ and enjoyed thinking about where the villagers should hide from the pirates.
On Tuesday, some of the children were able to go to the Mother’s Day shop with their siblings. We learnt lots of new vocabulary related to pirates such as crow’s nest, Jolly Roger, cannons, mast and portcullis. The children enjoyed the story of ‘The Last Supper’ during our collective worship.
On Wednesday, we drew and labelled a pirate ship together. The children then wrote their own descriptions of pirate ships using all their new vocabulary.
On Thursday, the rest of the children were able to visit the Mother’s Day shop. We watched a clip from Peter Pan and talked about pirates. What do they look like? We made Wanted posters to try and catch the pirates! We changed our reading books and sent home all books today.
On Friday, we finished British Science Week by thinking about the lifecycle of a frog. We currently have tadpoles in our classroom who are growing fast!
Well done to our Stars of the Week, Emily and Ethan.
Our mystery readers this week were and Ollie’s Nan and Zachary’s Mum. Thank you for coming to share a story with us!
Please speak to your child’s class teacher to put a date in the diary if you would like to be mystery reader. We still have many available dates this term so please get in touch if you can help!
Have a fantastic weekend!
Miss Nicholas and Miss Selwyn
