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.