This week was all about our show – and what a wonderful show it was! Thank you to everyone for all your support and encouragement; at home, with costumes and in the audience. The children were really proud of themselves and rightly so!

Despite such a busy and exciting week, we managed to squeeze in some time for our phonics. We learnt two further sounds: h and l. Here are the picture prompts and handwriting sayings for these letter sounds. Both sounds can be quite tricky to say – be careful not to drop your jaw with either one – don’t say luh or huh, for example. For l, your tongue should touch the inside of your top teeth and stay there when saying the sound. For h, try putting your open palm in front of your mouth and feel your breath as you say the sound – very quietly. Hope that helps a bit!

Our Spotlight Story this week was the newly published ‘What the Ladybird Heard at Christmas’ by Julia Donaldson. We love these stories and, you may remember, we read the other four in the series earlier in the term. You can revisit the new one here:

We also read another version of the story of the Nativity – once again, a beautifully illustrated book – called A Christmas Story by Brian Wildsmith which you can revisit here:

We were inspired to create our own nativity scenes:

…decorate our class Christmas tree…

…and we got to work, wrapping and labelling Christmas presents to put under the tree…

In our P.E. lessons this term, we have been learning how to organise ourselves; getting changed in and out of our P.E. kits, arranging our clothes carefully on our chairs so we can find them when we need to change back into them and putting our P.E. kits away on our pegs.

We have also been learning how to find a space for ourselves in the big hall and how to move different parts of our bodies. We have loved our Friday yoga sessions and, yesterday, we were so excited to have three of our Year 6 children join us. They were very impressed with our yoga skills!

If you would like to revisit the session we followed this week, you can find it here:

Have a lovely weekend everyone, stay warm!

Many of the songs we have been learning for our Christmas show tell the story of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem so, this week, we read a beautifully illustrated version of The Nativity by May Eliot and Richard Johnson which you can revisit here:

We were amazed to discover that Mary was visited by an Angel called Gabriel who told her that she would have a baby called Jesus who would be the Son of God. We thought she would have felt “surprised”, “confused” and “scared”.

We also learnt that Mary and her husband Joseph had to go on a very long journey just before baby Jesus was due to be born. They had to travel all the way from Nazareth, where they lived, to a town called Bethlehem, where Joseph himself had been born. We wondered how long it would have taken to make this journey so, we asked Google and discovered that it would have taken them about 4 days! We also wondered why they had gone on a donkey and not in a car or on an airplane. After some discussion, we concluded that cars and airplanes did not exist 2000 years ago!

Next, we discovered that when Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem there was nowhere for them to stay as all of the hotels (or inns) were full. A kind and friendly innkeeper took pity on them and let them sleep in his stable, which was lucky as baby Jesus was about to be born! We learnt that a stable is a place where farm animals are kept.

We also read a lovely, snowy story (called Charlie and Tess by Martin Hall) about the friendship between a sheep and a sheepdog. The story helped us to think about the sort of animals we might find on a farm. You can revisit it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWehaivMRkE

We learnt that Christmas is a time of year when Christians celebrate the birth of baby Jesus all those years ago in a stable in Bethlehem. And we learnt that Advent is the time of preparation before Christmas when Christians get ready for this celebration. Many of us were excited to share that we have Advent calendars at home (often filled with yummy chocolates!) that help us to count down the days until Christmas and we may also have Advent wreaths that are lit on each Sunday during the 4 weeks of Advent, just like Mr Quinn’s wreath in the school hall.

In our phonics lessons, we learnt two new sounds. Here are the picture prompts and handwriting sayings for these letter sounds:

Don’t forget, our Christmas performances take place next week and we can’t wait to sing our songs for you! On Friday, we took a trip to the local postbox to post our invitations to the show (photos to follow!). We wrote these ourselves and we are very proud of them!

We do hope everyone will receive their invitation before the show but we appreciate the postal service is a little erratic these days. When your invitation does make it through your front door – please do take a moment to show it to your child and point out that it is the very same letter that they posted last week. You might also like to talk about the journey the letter took to reach you. Thank you!