Our spotlight story this week was another ‘Splish, Splash, Splosh’ adventure: the delightful story of Mr Gumpy’s Outing by John Burningham which you can revisit here:

There are 12 characters in the story, so we used a large, empty egg box (with spaces for 12 eggs) as Mr Gumpy’s boat to help us retell the story. As we went through the story, we put each of the characters into the empty spaces, thinking about how many spaces had been filled and how many were left. You might like to have a go at home – don’t worry if you don’t have all the different toy animals – you could use bottle tops or buttons or anything else you have that will easily fit into the egg sections. The best part of the story is when the boat tips into the water and, of course, this is a fun part to retell with your egg box and its contents.

Next, we wondered if we could have a go at retelling the story in the water tray. I asked the children if they thought an egg box would make a good boat and several were quick to point out that cardboard is probably not the best material to use for a boat as it “breaks in water”. We decided this is because cardboard is not waterproof and absorbs water. We had a think about the sort of materials that are waterproof and decided that plastic and metal might be better. And indeed, Mrs Mooney told us about travelling to Ireland on a car ferry that was made of metal.

We don’t have any metal in our junk modelling area, but we do have plenty of plastic, so we set ourselves the challenge of designing and making our own boats thinking carefully about the different 3D shapes we could use to bring our designs to life.

We then headed into the outdoor classroom to test out our designs in the water tray. The children used all sorts of impressive scientific vocabulary (e.g. float, sink, test, absorb) and questions (I wonder if, what if I, how can I get it to…) as their boats set sail. And, of course, they had to check their prediction that cardboard breaks in water – surprising themselves with just how quickly it does so. They were also fascinated with how difficult it is to create a submarine…

We also learnt another ‘special friends’ sound: ‘oo’ as in zoo, moo and, of course, poo! Here is the picture prompt and saying that goes with this sound:

We hope everyone is having a lovely weekend, see you on Monday!

This week, we read the story of The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister which helped us to think about what it really means to be a good friend. After much discussion, we decided that it is important to think about what other people are feeling and not just to think about ourselves. We also decided that the Rainbow Fish was happy at the end of the story because he made the other fish happy and, when you make others happy, this can actually make you feel happy too!

Mr Quinn reminded us in his assembly this week that, at St. Matthew’s, we always remember to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31).

You can revisit the story of The Rainbow Fish here:

Next, we read the story of Grumpy Duck by Joyce Dunbar. This story also helped us to think about friendships and, in this case, the sort of words we should and should not use when others want to play with us:

At the end of the story, when all the animals play in the rain together, a beautiful rainbow appears overhead. The illustration inspired us to have a go at painting our own rainbows. There was, however, a small problem as Miss Cronin could only find red, yellow and blue paint! Fortunately, we have some expert colour mixers in Reception who were able to explain that we could mix these three colours, which are known as primary colours, in different combinations to create the missing (secondary) colours we needed! We were amazed to discover that if you mix the two primary colours nearest each other on a rainbow, you can create the missing colour in between!

We even tried mixing the colours straight onto the paper which helped us to see the missing colours appearing…

In our phonics lessons, we learnt two new special friends. The first was ‘igh’ which is actually a trigraph or, in other words, a single sound represented by three letters. The sound is pronounced in the same was as the word I, as in I am and you find it in words such as night, light, bright, knight, etc. The saying that goes with this sound is ‘igh, fly high’:

The next sound we learnt is also a special friends sound – this time, another digraph. It is ‘ow’ and is pronounced in the same way that you would say ‘oh’ when surprised. It can be found in words such as blow, slow, snow. Please note, although ‘ow’ can also be pronounced as the sound you might make when hurt in words such as clown, brown and down, we have not learnt this yet. For the time being, we are just focusing on the ‘oh’ version which was very helpful this week when we wanted to write the word ‘rainbow’ in our retelling of the Rainbow Fish story!

Here is the saying for the ‘ow’ sound:

We hope everyone is having a lovely weekend and see you on Monday!

The highlight of our week was, of course, our trip to Godstone Farm! It was with great excitement that we boarded the coach on Thursday morning, put on our seatbelts and set off down the A3. After at least twenty “are we there yets”, we arrived at the farm and were met by Farmer Caroline who used to work at London Zoo with the red pandas! We were so lucky to have such an expert and enthusiastic host. The farm itself was absolutely full of animals; we saw peacocks, cows, goats, llamas, alpacas and even several reptiles (of which we are now experts ourselves after our visit from Tom last term).

Farmer Caroline then took us to do some pond dipping and we discovered some amazing creatures living in the depths of the pond, including bloodworms, tadpoles and dragonfly larva. Next, we met a guinea pig, a rabbit, a tortoise, a chick and a hedgehog and we were allowed to touch each of these! After lunch, we fed the pigs and piglets and then cheered the piglets on in a hogstacle race!

We had a wonderful time and were so lucky with the weather. A huge thank you must go to our parent helpers who gave up their precious time to spend the day with us and, of course, to everyone at home for supporting this trip. Thank you so much.

Here are some photos from the day:

We are very much looking forward to our school trip to Godstone Farm next week and, to get us thinking about the sort of animals we might see, we read several stories about Mrs Wishy Washy and her farm animals. We loved these stories and were able to read much of them ourselves, as they are full of red words and sounds that we already know!

They were written by Joy Cowley and you can revisit (and perhaps even re-read) them here:

In our phonics lessons, we learnt the special friends sound ‘ee’. This sound is pronounced in the same way that you pronounce the letter name for ‘e’ and you look like you are grinning when you say it. Here is the picture prompt that goes with this sound and the children say “ee, what can you see” to help them remember this sound.

In our maths lessons, we have been thinking about how numbers can be made up of other numbers.

We also had a go at partitioning numbers into 5 and a bit; for example, 9 is made of 5 and 4, 8 is made of 5 and 3, etc. We used ‘bunny ears’ to help us understand that numbers between 5 and 10 can be broken down into two numbers – five fingers on one hand (or bunny ear) and a number of fingers on the other hand (or bunny ear)…

We hope everyone has been enjoying the long weekend – see you on Tuesday!