This week we said ‘goodbye’ to our fluffy friends and welcomed instead 10 very hungry caterpillars and some tadpoles! We look forward to seeing how they change over the next couple of weeks…

We’ve spent a great deal of time outdoors this week, working on our gross motor skills using the ropes, bikes and scooters. We also decided during PE time to get out in the sunshine and play some tennis instead of staying indoors for gymnastics We learnt how to hold and position a tennis racket and how to balance and bounce a ball safely. We’ve been delighted to now have access to these things during our Discovery time now that we can use them safely.

Our garden, with lots of help from the children, continues to grow and develop with lots more plants added. We enjoyed smelling the flowers and herbs which we hope will entice minibeasts and pollinators to our garden (mint, lavender, curry plant and strawberries). The children were very surprised to see that over the weekend, the frame of a greenhouse had sprung up in the Bug Area! Mr Aquilina, husband of Mrs Aquilina, very kindly built it for us and it is our intention to clad the frame with recycled 2litre bottles, e.g. coke/lemonade. If you have any standard 2 litre bottles that you are able to bring in (with the bottoms cut off ideally) we would be very grateful, thank you. We hope to start this process next week.

Thank you to our two parent-volunteers who have been in reading with the children this week (Mrs Watson and Mrs Walker).

Next week, is Diversity Week and we look forward to teaching the children about faiths other than Christianity.

In Maths this week we have been looking at four-sided shapes; specifically the similarities and differences between squares and rectangles. We have also been practising using the language of ‘more than’ and ‘fewer than’. Note, ‘fewer than’ is used similarly to ‘less than’ but for quantities of countable amounts. For example, pens and sweet are countable, whereas, water and sand are not countable. We would say, ‘you have fewer pens than I do’ but ‘you have less sand than I do’. Please ask a teacher if you would like to discuss this further to clarify.

Have a lovely weekend in the sunshine, everyone! See you on Monday…

The Year R Team

PS – If you could please take a moment to name all uniform over the weekend, it would make our home-times a lot simpler. Thanks in advance.

Our eggciting learning continued this week when a variety of eggs appeared in our Curiousity Cube. Whose eggs do you think they are?!

Our text driver this week was called ‘How to Grow a Dinosaur’ and we enjoyed spotting clues and then putting some pictures in the right order to retell the story. So many of the children wowed us with the writing to match the pictures this week. We are so proud of them for applying the sounds we have learnt to their writing.

In Maths we have been looking at 6 being 1 more than 5 and 7 being 2 more than 5 on a Hungarian number frame. We did this alongside the nursery rhyme 5 little men in a flying saucer to see what would happen if 1 more man joined… then another.

In phonics we have been continuing to apply our phase 2 and phase 3 sounds to reading and writing. Starting next week most of the children will be continuing to learn the rest of the phase 3 sounds.

The children also took part in a jungle drama workshop on Wednesday where they learnt banana language and resucued Snow the leopard from the silly crocodile!

In their book bag today the children have come home with a Super Six envelope. Inside this envelope are 6 words. These words need to be learnt by the children by sight to help them with their reading fluency. Words on greeen card can be sounded out but we would like your child to learn them by sight. Red words are tricky words that cannot be sounded out. We will then check them regularly at school and once they have managed to confidently recognise and read the word by sight 3 times, they will be given a new word or words. Please support your child in learning these words at home. These words must come to and from school inside this envelope every day as we are unable to support your child in learning them if they are not in their book bag.

To end the week, some chicken eggs arrived and are currently in an incubator to hatch next week! We will tell you more about it once they have hatched…

We hope you have a lovely weekend and look forward to seeing you next week.

The Year R team

What a busy week! On Tuesday, we celebrated Shrove Tuesday with a pancake race! We got into teams and cheered each other on. On Wednesday, we joined a beautiful service in the hall, led by Mr Crozier to mark Ash Wednesday – the first day of Lent. The children really impressed Mr Crozier with their quiet sitting and thoughtful answers to his questions.

This week in Phonics, we have been continuing practising the sounds we have learnt so far and applying them to reading and writing.
Please continue to read your child’s phonics book daily and speak to you child’s class teacher if you are having any difficulty doing this.

This week we made an exciting discovery of some eggs in our outdoor area. At first we were not sure what they were or where they came from so we kept them warm and safe in the classroom. Surprisingly on Wednesday they hatched and we are now looking after 2 tiny baby Dinosaurs! We had to do some research to find out what type of dinosaurs they are- Starfish class have a stegosaurus and seahorse class have a triceratops. We will be continuing to learn about Dinosaurs next week.

In Maths we have been thinking about the composition of the number 5 and singing 5 little specked frogs noting that there are 5 frogs altogether but some are in the water and some on the log. e.g. 3 in the water leaves 2 on the log as 3 and 2 make 5.

We were very impressed with the effort made for World book day and it was a delight to see the children in their costumes. Thank you for your support with this. We read the story Julian is a Mermaid by Jessica Love, about a boy who wants to be a mermaid and at the end of the story joins a mermaid parade. We then made our own parade accessories and went singing and dancing in a procession around the school!

Have a super weekend and we look forward to seeing you all again on Monday!

The Year R Team