Welcome back to the second half of the Spring Term.  We hope everyone had a lovely half term break.  It seems so hard to believe that we are now halfway through the Reception year!

Before the half term holiday, we took a break from our ‘Once Upon a Time’ topic to learn about Chinese New Year (which took place during the half term week on Friday 16th February).  We learnt about the story of the zodiac which explains how the 12 years of the zodiac cycle were named after the 12 different animals in a race.  The Jade Emperor decided that whichever animal won the race would have the first year named after it.  The second animal to cross the finish line would have the second year named after it, then the third, fourth, fifth and so on.  We all thought the rat was very sneaky.  Can you remember why?

You can watch a clip of the story here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/stories/lets-celebrate-chinesenewyearperformance

Weekend challenge: Have a look at the zodiac picture above.  Can you use the words first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth to talk about the picture and the story of the zodiac.  Find out which year you were born in and use the zodiac picture to find out which animal year you were born in. Write it down in a sentence (e.g. I was born in the year of the …). Can you find out when some of the people in your family were born?  This chart will help you find out about the grown-ups in your home:

In our phonics lessons, we have learnt 4 more sounds since the last blog post (two before the half term break and two this week).  Here are the mouth shapes, actions and picture prompts for the digraphs ‘th’, ‘ng’, ‘ai’ and ‘ee’.

There are actually two versions of the ‘th’ sound: a ‘voiced’ one and an ‘unvoiced’ one.  If you say the words ‘thin’ and ‘that’, you should notice the rather subtle difference (i.e. air being blown out or not).

In class, we talked about this sound being a little bit rude, in that you need to stick your tongue out – just a tiny bit when saying words like that, the and this – and a little bit further when saying words like thin, Thursday and thumb.

At this point, we would just like the children to be recognising this digraph as the one where they stick their tongue out and we are not too concerned about them hearing the difference between these two versions.  If you would like to explore the difference with them, however, please do so!

Here’s another way of explaining it!

Instead of the jolly phonics action, we decided to say the voiced sound ‘th’ and show a thumbs up.

The diagraph ‘ng’ is the sound you can here at the end of words such a ‘ring’ and ‘king’.  Please note I’ve included a sound clip for ‘ng’ this time, as I couldn’t find an example of the mouth shape!)

The diagraph ‘ai’ sounds like the name of the letter ‘a’ – prounounced ‘ay’.

This week, we read the fantastic story of ‘Grandpa’s magic slippers’ and we thought about what our own magic slippers or shoes might look like!

We looked at some weird and wonderful shoe designs, including some by Andy Warhol (see below) and those in a great little book by Linda O’Keeffe.  We had a go at drawing our own magic shoes and we will be continuing to work on these next week.

Please note, not all of the shoes we looked at for inspiration were high-heeled shoes aimed at women! We ensured, as always, that we also showed the children shoes that were gender-free and some that challenged their gender assumptions!

Finally, we have two number bags to catch up on for the numbers 15 and 14.  As always, our stars of the week did a fantastic job of filling up their numbers bags and presenting the contents to the class!

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

As we all know, Once Upon A Time stories are packed full of Princesses dancing with Princes and living happily ever! This week, we wanted to know how this influences the children ideas, so we asked them to share their thoughts about what Princesses are and, specifically, what they think Princesses wear and do.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, many said they wear dresses and tiaras and dance at fancy balls!

We decided to show the children some photos of real-life Princesses (i.e. Diana and the Duchess of Cambridge) to challenge their ideas about what Princesses look like and to introduce them to the idea that there is often a distinction between story-book characters and people in real-life.  We also wanted them to pick up on the idea that real-life Princesses do a lot of humanitarian work (when they are not busy dancing, of course!).  I’m not sure they were entirely convinced that these women, dressed in trousers and tracksuit bottoms, were Princesses!  But they were certainly intrigued by the idea, particularly by the photo of Princess Diana walking alongside the dangerous landmine signs.

We then read the story “Not All Princesses Dress in Pink” which encouraged the children to think about Princesses as children like them who can do anything they set out to do (e.g. build forts, play in the mud, etc.) – very much like the girls (and boys) in our class.

The children were quite inspired by this challenge to their assumptions and created their own fantastic word display in our outdoor classroom…

Speaking of our outdoor classroom, we immersed the children in our Cinderella theme this week, with several ‘invitations to play’ in our outdoor area:

We also found time to read the story of Prince Cinders, which is another Cinderella story, only this time with a male lead!  It is written by the wonderful author Babette Cole and is certainly worth a re-read if you come across it.

In our phonics lessons, we learnt the digraphs ‘ch’ and ‘sh’.  Here are the actions, mouth shapes and picture prompts.

Our star of the week did a fantastic job of filling her number bag up with all things to do with the number 13.

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

Finallly, we just wanted to say a huge thank you to all our wonderful parents and carers for your extra support this week when we had our special visitors in school.  Your kinds words and encouragement meant an awful lot, thank you!