Week Ending 30/01/25
Date: 30th Jan 2025 @ 3:56pm
Happy Friday! This week we've been focusing on new vocabulary from our story 'Let's All Creep Through Crocodile Creek'. These include knobbly, gnarly, lumpy, bumpy, pokey pointey, scritchy, scratchy, flippy, whippy and swingy, springy. We've noticed that each of these pair of words rhyme and identified the alliteration in each one. We explored the vocabulary by feeling different textures to match to the words such as bark, shells, pine cones, sticks and textured fabric. We thought about each part of the journey of mouse, rabbit and tortoise and acted this out through freeze frames.
Dates for the diary (Spring Term)
- Friday 7th February 3:30-4:30pm - PTA EYFS and KS1 Disco (school hall). The PTA are desperate for parent volunteers for the event. If you are able to, please let us know whether or not you can spare an hour to support this event. If the PTA don’t get enough help from each year group, the event will be cancelled. Thank you.
- Tuesday 11th/Wednesday 12th February – Parents Evening (face-to-face in school)
- Thursday 6th March – World Book Day
- Monday 31st March - Trip to Crown Bank Quarry Nature Reserve. Parent volunteers needed if you're available!
- Wednesday 2nd April – Dormice class assembly (9am – school hall)
Peace Out
Next week we will be looking at ways in which we can support our mental health and well-being. Self-regulation is a big part of the early years and knowing how we can regulate our emotions is something that we try to support with from the very beginning of their time in school. We have really been getting into mindfulness with a programme called 'Peace Out' which is all about deep breathing and relaxing the mind and body. You may want to have it on if your child struggles to get to sleep. Here is the link:
Little Wandle (Phonics)
This week we learnt four new sound ER and AIR using the new Little Wandle grapheme cards and phrases which concludes all the sounds we will be learning this year. We have also learnt the tricky words ARE, SURE and PURE.
For further information on how to support your child with phonics, please visit the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds website: https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/
You will find a grapheme information sheet to help you with pronunciation in your child’s book bag on MONDAY. It is really important that you pronounce the sounds correctly at home if you are supporting your child. Please see videos on the link provided.
If you have any questions regarding phonics, please speak to me or Mrs Line. Thank you for your continued support. We will be beginning this half term's phonics assessment next week in preparation to share these results with you for Parents Evening.
In Maths, we met Numberblock 7 who makes up the 7 colours of the rainbow (one for each number block). We have also been practising our counting skills by starting from different numbers and counting forwards and backwards. This is a great skill for early mathematicians. We have focused on splitting seven into two parts and finding all the pairs of numbers to make our whole. We did this using tens frames and two different colours to represent the two parts. I also taught the children a magic dice trick. If you have a dice at home, ask your child to show you this trick...it certainly impressed them!
On Monday, we looked at the different character traits of mouse, tortoise and rabbit. We worked together to read and match the sentences that best fit each character.
On Tuesday, we continued thinking about the personalities of each character and thought about what they might say. We introduced the children to speech bubbles and what this looks like in their reading books.
On Wednesday, the children were amazed by the invisible signs that had been left in the creek. We used water colour paints to reveal the hidden message and wrote our own signs to display in the creek.
On Thursday, we learnt about the term 'pitch' and put this into practise by listening to a range of clips. With our pieces of fabric we had to wave it in the air if it was a 'high' pitch and wave it on the ground if it were a 'low' pitch. We then practised using our fabric to learn a new action song. Watch this space for next week's video!
On Friday, we loved learning all about Chinese New Year! The children learnt about the different traditions surrounding the celebration, we researched where china was, located it on a map and learnt key facts about China. They also listened carefully to the story of the great race and how each year came to be named after an animal. We linked this to our maths and explored ordinal numbers such as first, second and third. We matched the number to where each animal finished in the race.
Congratulations to our Star of the Week, Leo K!
Our Mystery Reader this week was JJ's mum. Thank you for coming to share a story with us!
Dates remaining for Mystery Reader this term:
Friday 14th March 3pm
Friday 28th March 3pm
Have a wonderful weekend!
Miss Selwyn
