This week, we read the story of A Chair for Baby Bear.  It’s such an enjoyable story and tells the tale of Baby Bear’s search for a new chair after Goldilocks has been to visit.

You can hear the story being retold in this CBeebies clip:

The children were then challenged to design their very own chairs for baby bear and to make their designs using junk materials.  They had to think carefully about the shapes of the different materials they used, considering both stability and comfort.

Here are the finished products – quite impressive I’m sure you’ll agree!  Several of our mini-mes also enjoyed trying out the various chairs which led to lots of imaginative make-believe play!

In our maths lessons this week, we have been linking our whole school theme of fairness to our number work.  In other words, we have been thinking about how to make things fair when sharing out equally.

Weekend challenge: How many different ways can you share out 10 sweets between 2 people? Draw a picture or some number sentences to show the different ways. How many of the ways are fair? Can you find a way to share out 10 sweets between 3 people – try and make it fair, does it work? Why not?

In our phonics lessons this week we learnt the digraph ‘oo’ which makes two sounds; sometimes a short sound and sometimes a long one.  The trouble is, you can’t tell which sound it’s making just by looking at it. You have to try both and see which one sounds best and makes sense within the word.  For example, it makes a long sound in the word m-oo-n but a short sound in the word b-oo-k. Here is the action to help us remember ‘oo’ and distinguish between the two versions:

Here is the mouth shape for the long ‘oo’ sound:

And the short ‘oo’ sound:

And here are the picture prompts we used for our sentence writing:

One of our previous Stars of the Week did a fantastic job of presenting his 16 number bag:

Our new number of the week was chosen as number:

Finally, one of the carpet sessions we enjoy most weeks is based around the CBeebies series ‘Get Squiggling’.  The children use their listening and understanding skills to follow a series of instructions to complete a drawing on their whiteboards.  They are encouraged to think carefully about the different sorts of lines they use (e.g. straight, curved, zigzag) to complete their drawings and to add extra details if they wish.  This week, the children were challenged to draw a pirate picture and all did a fantastic job of course!

Our whole-school theme this half term is justice and, in Reception, we have been thinking about how we can work together to make things fair.  One of the ways in which we try to keep things fair is by using the sand-timer to take equal turns on the bikes or on the classroom computer.  We also know how to use the number mats to order ourselves when we are waiting for our turn on the Interactive Whiteboard.  Well done Reception!   

As you can probably imagine, reading the story of Goldilocks has prompted lots of conversations about fairness, as well as ways in which we can all be more thoughtful and, most importantly, try to make things better when things do go wrong.  We all agreed that one of the ways in which Goldilocks could have made things better would have been to say sorry to the Three Bears.

We read a different sort of Goldilocks story this week – A Bad Week for the Three Bears – which is actually a prequel to the traditional tale.  In the story, we discover that the poor, old three bears have actually had quite a rough week even before Goldilocks visits and creates such chaos.

We also took turns taking on the roles of Goldilocks and Baby Bear! We have some amazing actors in our class who were able to convey how these characters were feeling through both their facial expressions and their own choice of words in role (e.g. baby bear ended up inviting Goldilocks for a playdate!).

In our phonics lessons this week, we learnt 2 new digraphs; ‘oa’ and ‘ar’

The sound for the digraph ‘oa’ is the same as the letter name ‘o’ and can be found in words such as ‘goat’ and ‘boat’.  Here is the mouth shape, action and picture prompt for ‘oa’:

We also learnt the digraph ‘ar’ as in c-ar and f-ar.  Here is the action, mouth shape and picture prompt for this digraph:

We had a bit of a catch up this week, we two of our previous Stars of the Week presenting their fantastic number bags for numbers 17 and 19 to the class:

Our new number of the week was chosen as number:

What a beautifully snowy week it was!  We loved getting out and about in the snow and felt so lucky to have so much open space in our lovely school which gave us all the chance to experience that lovely crunchy sound you hear when walking on freshly-fallen snow!

On Thursday, Miss Cronin, Mrs Mooney and Mrs Morris couldn’t get to school because of the snow, but fortunately Goldilocks, Mummy Bear and Daddy Bear turned up instead and read lots of stories to the class! 😉

Baby bear turned up in the afternoon!

A huge thank you to all the parents and carers for supplying such fantastic costumes for the children on World Book Day.  We had a whole school assembly in the afternoon where we paraded our costumes and watched the rest of the school parade theirs.

In other news…

We learnt one new sound this week: a new sort of sound known as a trigraph.  It’s a bit like a digraph (where two letters sit together making one sound) but in this case three letters sit together making just one sound.

The trigraph we learnt is ‘igh’, as in ‘high’.  Although the word high is made up of 4 letters, it is only made up of 2 sounds, i.e. h-igh.  We decided that the action for ‘igh’ would be holding three fingers up high.

In our maths lessons this week we have been thinking about making repeating patterns.  We used lego pieces to make pattern towers such as ‘red, blue, red, blue, red, blue’ which we call an AB pattern.  We also had a go at making an AABB pattern, e.g. red, red, blue, blue, red, red, blue, blue.

Weekend challenge: Make a pattern using objects you have at home (e.g. spoons and forks, teddy bears and cars, cups and bowls, etc.).  Can you use these objects to make an AB pattern? Now try making an AABB pattern.  If that was too easy, find another set of objects to add to your pattern – try making an ABC pattern, an AABBCC pattern or even an AAABBBCCC pattern! Are there any other patterns you can make?

Finally, our new number of the week has been chosen as number: