We have had a fun and busy two weeks back at school after our half-term holiday.
Our new topic this half term is ‘Journeys’. We were very excited to find a box in our yard with a teddy bear inside. Where did the teddy bear come from? Why did it appear in our yard? After lots of great discussion, we found out that it was Baby Bear from the story ‘Whatever Next!’ by Jill Murphy. The story is about Baby Bear and his adventure to the moon. Baby Bear finds a rocket, a space helmet and some space boots and sets out on his journey. We did some fantastic writing of what we would take if we were going to the moon. We also sequenced the story and retold it to Mrs Cook.
In Maths, we have been focusing on ‘more than’, ‘less than’ and ‘equal to’ to describe the relationships between numbers. We used the Numberblocks to help us with our learning.
A travelling production company came to our school to perform Wind in the Willows. Ten children from our school were selected to take part in the interactive performance. We had a fantastic time watching the show!
Last Thursday, we celebrated World Book Day. We visited the library where we shared some of our favourite stories. We coloured in our own personalised bookmark and we designed a book cover for our favourite story.We found it very interesting learning about fossils, we know that Mary Anning was a fossil collector. We made our own dinosaur fossil out of salt dough!
Last week was Children’s Mental Health week and the theme being ‘Let’s connect’ We had a think about different connections that we have with people and how they make us feel. Linking to previous learning of the Colour Monster story, we also shared how we feel and why we feel the way that we do. We enjoyed doing yoga and learning different breathing techniques. Our peer mentor friends from year 5 did a circle time activity with us where we had to swap places if we like certain things e.g. swap places if you like pizza, swap places if you like dogs, swap places if you have a pet cat etc. Making connections between our friends in Reception. We also took part in Dress to Express yourself day!
Last week was also Safer Internet Day. Mrs Cook showed us a PowerPoint and told us about how we can keep safe when we are on the internet. We also listened to a story by Smartie the Penguin who needed our help to decide what to do in certain situations. The answer is to ALWAYS tell an adult if something is not right or if you need any help when using tablets, phones, games consoles or any other device where you can access the internet.
We have started our new topic called ‘Amazing Animals’ and to begin our topic a box arrived outside our classroom and we were very curious to find out what was inside… it was a penguin. Back in the classroom a book called Lost and Found was left. The story is about a boy and one day a penguin arrives at his door, the boy thought the penguin was lost and he tries to return him. Is this why the penguin arrived at our school? We had a class discussion about penguins and what we already know about them. In Literacy, we followed step by step instructions to create our own penguin and then wrote a description. We all retold the story in our own words and Mrs Cook was super impressed at how much of the story we could remember. In the story, the boy took the penguin back to the South Pole. We looked on a map and a globe to see where the South Pole/ Antarctica is and then compared it to where we live. We thought about the things that we would need to take if we were going on a journey to the South Pole. We drew pictures and did some fantastic writing, we also did an observational painting of a penguin and made penguin biscuits.
In Maths, we have been learning about the composition of 5 where 5 can be split into different parts. We did this using the song 5 Little Speckled Frogs. We acted the song out and showed the numbers on our fingers each time. We use the sentence: 5 is made from 4 and 1. 5 is made from 3 and 2. 5 is made from 2 and 3.
Reception have also been learning about Chinese New Year. We had great fun tasting delicious Chinese food, we tested our fine motor skills by using chopsticks to sort pom-poms, we made Chinese lanterns and Chinese dragons. We also wrote numbers to 5 in Chinese. We have been reading and learning about the Great Race Story and how each year is named after an animal. This year is the year of the rabbit so we did an observational drawing of a rabbit.
In RE, we have been exploring the question ‘Why is the word ‘God’ so important to Christians?’ We talked about Christians and why the word ‘God’ is important as they believe God is the creator of the universe and all that is in it, including people and animals. Two Christian puppets (Tom and Tessa) helped us learn all about God. Tom asked “Which day did God create jellyfish?” Tom and Tessa’s family believe God is the giver of life, giving life even to jellyfish. We listened to a story about how Christians believe God created the universe. We then made our own jellyfish craft!