This week, the children had two very special visitors – Henrietta the Hen & Farmer Alice from Deen City Farm. They came to entrust the children with an important job – the care of 10 chick eggs which are now safely tucked up in an incubator in the classroom! Over the next three weeks, the children will ensure the eggs stay safe and warm as the chicks begin to grow and (hopefully!) hatch on day 21 of their incubation!
In other (far less exciting!) news, the children also learnt the trigraphs ‘ear’ and ‘air’:
Welcome back to the summer term in Reception. We hope everyone had a restful Easter break. It is hard to believe we are already into the final term of the Reception year! We have lots of exciting activities planned for the term ahead and we look forward to sharing these with the children. What a beautifully sunny start we have had – let’s hope there is more of this lovely weather to come!
Our topic this term will be ‘Ticket to Ride’ and for the next few weeks we will be focusing on heading ‘down to the farm’. We will be reading lots of farmyard stories in preparation for our trip to Godstone Farm the week after next.
This week we read the story of ‘Oww!’ which tells the tale of poor Piggy Piglet who manages to get a thistle stuck to his bottom! He asks all of his farmyard friends to help him solve his prickly problem. The story uses many of the sounds (including digraphs) that we have learnt so far, particularly when the animals are speaking (e.g. m-oo, w-oo-f, oi-n-k, ow-ee, b-a-a, k-i-ck), so it’s a super story to have a go at re-reading yourself.
You can listen to the story and read it again here:
Naturally, we learnt the ‘ow’ diagraph this week as it links so nicely with Piggy Piglet’s story. Here’s the action, mouth shape and picture prompt for this digraph:
Please note, the action for ‘ow’ is the same as the Jolly Phonics action for ‘ou’:
Weekend Challenge: how many of these ‘ow’ words can you read? Remember to use your robot arms when you sound out the sounds. How many of these ‘ow’ words can you write? Remember to use your phoneme fingers when you spell out the words. Can you think of anymore ‘ow’ words?
The second digraph we learnt this week was ‘oi’. We read the story ‘Oi Frog!’ to introduce us to this new sound. We very much enjoyed the silly rhymes in this story and, it too, is well worth a re-read.
You can watch and re-read the story here:
Here is the action, mouth shape and picture prompt for the digraph ‘oi’:
In our maths lessons, we learnt about solid, 3D shapes. We had a go a sorting some 2D and 3D shapes (by doing the squishing test!) to make sure we understood the difference between flat 2D shapes and fat (or solid) 3D shapes. We then learnt the names of these seven 3D shapes (please note, we learnt the name ‘triangular prism’ rather than just prism!).
We then started to have a think about where we might find these shapes in the world around us:
Weekend Challenge: have a look around your home – can you find something that is the same shape as a sphere, cube, cuboid, cone, pyramid and cylinder. Don’t forget to find something that is the same shape as a triangular prism too! Take some photos of the things you find or draw some pictures and bring them in to show the class!
Finally, our Star of the Week did a fantastic job of presenting her number bag for the number 10:
If you are looking for more maths or literacy games to support your child’s learning at home, have a look at:
We then started to have a think about where we might find these shapes in the world around us:
