Dear All,

Parental access to Seesaw is available all this week.  Enjoy!

Miss C.

This week we joined the rest of the school in a celebration of Book Week.  The theme of the week was ‘Dreams’ and, in Reception, we linked the theme to our topic by reading a particularly heartwarming story called ‘Mermaid’ written by the CBeebies presenter Cerrie Burnell.  The story introduces the idea of a dream as something you wish for (i.e. the little boy wishes he could swim) as well as the idea of a dream as being something you experience when you are asleep (i.e. the little boy dreams he is swimming underwater with his new friend).

Later in the week, we talked about there being two types of nighttime dreams; some good and some bad.  Many of the children had lots to say on the matter and were very familiar with the feelings of being scared in the night, as described by the little girl in the second story we read this week; ‘Grandmother’s Dreamcatcher’.  We didn’t dwell on the subject of bad dreams or on feelings of being scared for long, but we all agreed everybody has bad dreams sometimes, even grown ups, and the most important thing to remember is that they are not real.

‘Grandmother’s Dreamcatcher’ is a North American book and tells the story of a little girl staying with her Grandmother while her parents are away.  Her Grandmother shows her how to make a dreamcatcher which catches bad dreams and only allows sweet dreams through.

We decided to make our own beautiful dreamcatchers which we will be bringing home shortly.

We finished off Book Week with a whole school ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ workshop. Each class worked with the director for half an hour and, at the end of the day, all the segments were put together to create the play!  The children in Reception and Year 1 worked together to recite ‘Puck’s Favourite Poem’.  It was all very exciting and a fantastic way to finish the week.

We finally said goodbye to our 6 chicks this week as Farmer Alice returned to collect them. Before they left, each child had a chance to hold one on their lap and we managed to get some lovely photos:

Our Star of the Week did another super job filling up his number bag with 20 objects.

We hope everyone has a wonderful half term! It is so hard to believe that when we come back it will be the final half of the summer term.  We will continue with our topic work, spend lots of time outside and celebrate the school’s 150th birthday!

If you are looking for a half term challenge how about trying some of these from the National Trust’s list of 50 things to do before you’re 11 and 3/4:

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/50-things-to-do-before-youre-11–activity-list

Have fun!

It has been a particularly exciting week with the arrival of our baby chicks, along with the kidnapping (by pirates) and daring rescue (by us) of the Singing Mermaid!

On Tuesday morning, the chick eggs finally started to hatch and by the end of the day, six wet and exhausted babies had pecked their way out into the world.

We named the chicks: Superchick, Chicky, Sweet, Rose, Annabel and Daisy.  The names were decided with a democratic vote.  Each child chose their preferred name from a large list of suggestions and wrote it on a post-it note.  We could then clearly see which names had the most votes.

The six chicks are all doing well and have been busy eating, drinking, pecking, cheeping, napping and growing.  At some point next week, they will be returning to Deen City Farm. If you have not already done so, please feel free to pop in and meet them with your child, after school one day next week, before they leave us.

On Tuesday, we also read the story of the Singing Mermaid who is tricked into leaving her home by the seashore to become a circus performer.  In the end, along with the help of her friends, she comes up with a clever plan to escape and find her way home.

The Singing Mermaid came to visit us in class and showed us how she managed to get back to the sea from the circus.  Can you remember what she did? Remember, she doesn’t have any legs, only a tail…

On Wednesday morning, we made a rather startling discovery in the water tray.  A message in a bottle had been left there overnight and it read:

The poor Singing Mermaid had been kidnapped once again.  Oh dear!  The children wasted no time in coming up with a plan to get the Singing Mermaid back and after much discussion we decided to write back to the pirates offering them 57 pieces of treasure in exchange for the safe return of the Singing Mermaid.  We popped our message back in the bottle and left it in the water tray after school.

The following day, the message had gone and a new message had appeared:

Those cheeky pirates!  Luckily, Reception are such good treasure hunters that they weren’t in the least fazed by the thought of having to find 100 pieces of treasure.  Working in ten teams of three children, each team searched the playground for 10 pieces of treasure.

Back in the classroom, we used a hundred square to carefully lay out the treasure in rows of 10.  Can you remember how many rows of 10 we needed to make 100?

We carefully poured the 100 pieces of treasure into a treasure box and wrote several messages back to the pirates letting them know we were ready for the exchange.

On Friday, another message appeared along with a treasure map!  This time, the message read: to Reception, bring the treasure, follow the map, from the pirates.

Without thinking twice, we grabbed our treasure box, the map and the Singing Mermaid’s empty shell and set off on our daring rescue mission.

In no time at all, we could see the pirate ship in the distance (in the KS2 playground!).  We snuck up on the ship, without a sound, so as not to alert the pirates to our presence.  Once there, two very brave children searched the lower deck, while another two climbed the ladder to the top.  As we all held our breath, the Singing Mermaid was found, on the top deck, cowering in a corner.

We quickly placed the treasure box in the spot where we had found her and raced back to the safety of our classroom. Phew! What a relief it was to have the Singing Mermaid back safe and sound!

In other news…

The children continue to be very inspired by our topic this term, building their own pirate ships outside, playing in the new pirate ship role-play area, drawing treasure maps and writing messages in bottles!

Our Star of the Week did yet another fantastic job of filling up his number bag with all things related to the number 19.

And the new number of the week has been chosen as number:

Weekend Challenge: can you make your own number bag for the number 20, or perhaps choose a bigger number!!

We dove head first into our topic work this week as we read several pirate stories, both fiction and non-fiction.  We have been busy making pirate hats, painting treasure and sailing the high seas with treasure maps!

We also read a lovely story about a lonely lion who finds living on a desert island a little too quiet for his liking.  He decides to send out a message in a bottle to find some friends and soon enough his island begins to fill up with visitors.

We also found a message in a bottle that had been left in our own water tray!  We carefully opened it up and discovered it was a message from Blue Fish, thanking the Rainbow Fish for sharing his scales. We were quite inspired by the idea of writing a message in a bottle and have been busy writing many of our own.  One of us (below) was delighted to receive a message in a bottle from a friend!

We also found time to revise the trigraph ‘igh’ and the digraph ‘oa’.  The children are really becoming such phonics experts; quickly and accurately identifying which sound is in which word (e.g. lightning, boat, knight, moat, goat, floating).

Weekend challenge: have a go at playing buried treasure: select phase 3, then set 1-7 plus ‘igh’ or ‘oa’.  Remember to put the real words in the treasure chest and the pretend words in the rubbish bin.  You could even make your own buried treasure game: here are some printables to get you started!

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/PrintablesBuriedTreasure.html

Our number of the week was number 6 and our star of the week did a super job of filling up his number bag with all sorts of things related to the number 6. Well done!

Our new number of the week has been chosen as number:

This week we also spent some time trying to find numbers on a blank hundred square. The children were given a number and had to explain how they might find out where it is hiding (e.g. can you find the number 11? can you explain why you think it it there?).  We use something called Number Splat which the children find quite appealing thanks to the splat sound you can hear when you touch different numbers!

Weekend challenge: using number splat, can you find the numbers 5, 18, 26, 44 and 78? Can you explain how you found them?

Our topic in Oak Class this term will be ‘Message in a Bottle’.  We will be reading all sorts of fishy and pirate tales and using our imaginations to sail the high seas.  You can download our new topic booklet here which will give you some ideas for the sorts of activities you might like to do at home to further support your child’s interest and learning within this topic.

Given that our whole school theme at St. Matthews this term will be friendship, we decided to start our topic by revisiting the story of the ‘Rainbow Fish’.  The children are always gripped by the story and its simple message of making friends through sharing. We decided to see if we could be Rainbow Fish ourselves this week by saying things like “yes, you can borrow the pink pen” instead of “no, I had it first” and “yes, you can have one of my red lego pieces” instead of “but I need it”.  We are working on a Rainbow Fish display for the classroom and we will be looking out for examples of these kinds of ‘friendship’ words to add to it over the coming weeks.

We also read the story of ‘Something Else’ which encouraged us to think about differences between us and our friends.  We realised that we already have lots of friends who are very different to us.  Some of our friends speak different languages to us.  Some of them like to eat different foods.  Others are even girls!

Of course, we have also been very busy looking after our chick eggs.  We are doing a great job of keeping them safe and warm in the incubator and we have been carefully counting down the days on our 21 day number chart.  Yesterday (Friday) was day 11.  Can you work out how many days there are left until our chick eggs begin to hatch?

We also watched an incredible animation of the growth of the chicks within the eggs during the 21 days.  You can watch it here again:

Weekend Challenge:  can you find out what the chicks start to have on day 12 and on day 13?  Write down a sentence or two to explain what they now have.

Our Star of the Week did yet another fantastic job of filling her number bag with all sorts of things related to the number 15.  She even included a tea bag packet with instructions suggesting the tea bag be steeped for 15 minutes, coins adding up to 15 pence and a jar containing 15g of peppercorns!

Weekend Challenge: how about setting yourself some time challenges.  For example, what can you do in 1 minute? How many toys can you pick up? How far can you run? How many star jumps can you do? What other time challenges could you set yourself?

Our new number of the week has been chosen as:

Within our phonics lessons this week, we revised the digraphs ‘ai’ and ‘ee’.  We also had another look at how to form the letter ‘a’ as many of us find this quite tricky.  Remember, if you are practising this one at home, start with a curly c, go up to the top, back down and add a tail.  Don’t take your pencil off because it is not an ‘o’ with a tail.

Here the CBeebies show ‘Get Squiggling’ shows you how to do it (skip to 2:07 for the ‘a’ letter a bit):

Finally, we had a bit of a treat this week, with a special music lesson.  Here we are with Soo, our music teacher, learning a turn-taking song. We are very much looking forward to our next lesson!