English

This week we have continued our learning about Little Red and the Very Hungry Lion! We used our letter writing skills from our Paddington's Post unit to imagine we were Little Red herself, writing a letter to her Daddy! We thought carefully about using capital letters for proper nouns and made decisions about what information we would want to tell Daddy about the day so far. 

We then revisited using the conjunction because to extend our sentences when describing the hungry lion's personality. Why was he suspicious? Greedy? Embarrassed? The children came up with fantastic sentences and could all think of reasons as to why lion is the way he is! 

We ended our week by focusing on our favourite characters and how we can use adjectives to describe them! We had the choice between Auntie Rosie, Little Red, Daddy and the hungry lion and our task was to write short phrases that included an adjective and a noun. For example, Little Red had a very friendly smile or the hungry lion had a cheeky grin and sharp teeth! The children were absolutely amazing at this and thought so carefully about not only their character's appearance but also their personality. 

Maths

This week we continued our unit about Multiplication and have practised counting in 2s, 5s and 10s each day! We revisited the world of doubles and challenged ourselves to move past the number 10, working hard to double the numbers 11-20! 

We introduced the concept of an Array which the children understand to be a helpful way to recognise equal groups and identify a total amount. We thought carefully about what a row is and what a column is and where these would be found in an array. We now know that rows go across (like we do when we are sitting on the carpet!) and columns are tall buildings. 

The children first practised making an array with cubes using a pictorial representation to guide them and verbalised how many rows and columns they could see. They then had a go at drawing their own array and used the following stem sentences to explain exactly what numbers they could see: 
There are _ rows. There are _ in each row. 
There are _ columns. There are _ in each column. 
There are _ altogether. 

This concept can be incredibly tricky for children to get their heads around but Miss D and I are SO proud of how well they have all persevered and thrived this week. 

Phonics

This week we revised sounds the children already know, including those that may appear in the Phonics Screening Check:

  • ea /e/ – feather, head, bread, breakfast
  • ir /ur/ – bird, skirt, girl, first
  • ou /ow/ – cloud, sound, about, out
  • oy /oi/ – boy, toy, enjoy, annoy

Tricky words: any, many, who

Topic Learning

Geography

We have continued learning all about the world around us this week but we narrowed our focus to the 7 continents! We were able to accurately name and identify them on a world map and then applied this knowledge to a map of our own, labelling each continent in turn. 

We then challenged ourselves to describe the location of each continent using positional language, such as North, East, South and West. For example, we know that Asia is North of Australia but Australia is North of Antarctica. 

Art 

The children have been working so hard on creating their own collages, inspired by the work of Tracey English. Last week we focused on bringing our background to life using the techniques we have learnt this term; tearing paper, crumpling paper and cutting it to ensure it has a clean, smooth edge. We then drew and painted our animals this week, ready to cut them out and stick them onto our backgrounds in next week's final step! 

 

Reminder

With the weather changing so often, please ensure your child brings a coat to school each day.

Don't forget that next Wednesday (the 20th May) there will be a Q&A session in the hall regarding information about mixing classes. The session will begin at 9am and is for general questions rather than about specific children. We look forward to seeing you there!