Welcome back to the second half of the Spring term. We hope everyone had a lovely half term break. Isn’t it is hard to believe we are now half way through the year in Reception!

It was Shrove Tuesday this week so of course we had to read the story of Mr Wolf’s Pancakes by Jan Fearnley. Oh dear, what a surprising story this was! We had lots of very interesting conversations about being kind and friendly and whether or not we thought Mr Wolf’s actions were justified! You can revisit the story here:

Afterwards, we were all very keen indeed to have a go at making our own pancakes. Mr Wolf wrote a shopping list before he went to the shops. Can you remember what was on the list? That’s right: eggs, flour and milk! Luckily, Miss Cronin had remembered to pop to the shops before school and had picked up all of the ingredients we needed. We measured, mixed and poured our pancake batter into a frying pan and even had a go at flipping a pancake ourselves (with a cold pancake and pan that Mrs Fenwick had cleverly cooked for us earlier!). Photos of our pancake flipping to follow… We also spent some time talking about how important it is to keep safe in a kitchen, staying well away from the stove and listening carefully to the grown-ups’ instructions.

The best part of the day had to be when we ate the pancakes and they were delicious! Some of us tried a little sprinkle of sugar on our pancake, others of us tried one with lemon and sugar. Some of us thought we might not like the taste of lemon but wanted to try anyway – well done for being brave and trying something new!

On Wednesday, it was Ash Wednesday which marks the first day of Lent in the Christian calendar. Mother Helen and Father Alastair led our whole school worship and talked to us about the sort of things people do during Lent to prepare for Easter. Back in the classroom, we decided to turn the tree in our prayer corner into a Lent tree. We all worked so hard to write and decorate a leaf with our lenten promises. The tree is looking wonderful and I will post a photo when it is complete. Can you remember what you wrote on your promise leaf?

Next, we read another surprising story – I am a Tiger by Karl Newson and Ross Collins. You can revisit this very funny story here: https://youtu.be/VnMHfxiQBdU

And then, we read yet another surprising story – Hungry Hen by Richard Waring and Caroline Jayne Church which you can reread here: https://youtu.be/oxexImCLeWk

Can you talked about what it means if something is surprising? Which was your favourite surprising story this week? Why was it your favourite? Can you come up with your own surprising story?

We have also been practising our subitising, composition and numeral recognition skills playing games where we have to think about what numbers are made of, practise using our doubles and number bond knowledge and link quantities to numerals.

Finally, in our phonics lessons we have been practising our set 1 speed sounds and focusing especially on the special friends sh, ch and th. We have also been reading our speedy green words and having a go at working with a partner to take turns reading/listening to a ditty (a mini sentence).

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

This week, we said goodbye to the Billabongs of Australia and headed east across the vast Pacific Ocean until we reached the shores of South America. We were looking for a lot of trees (as this is the next landscape in the ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt story) and what better place to find them than on the continent that contains the largest forest in the world; the Amazon Rainforest!

The little orange man guided us into land safely, deep in the rainforest amongst the trees and streams…

As we started to look around, Stanley (our three-toed sloth) suddenly became very excited! Apparently Stanley actually comes from the Amazon Rainforest and he recognised the place where we landed!

After this discovery, our first spotlight story simply had to be “Slowly, Slowly, Slowly”, said the Sloth by Eric Carle which you can revisit below. All of the animals in the book live in the Amazon Rainforest – can you remember the names of any of the animals? Don’t forget to pause the video on the last page so you can have a good look at all the beautiful animals alongside their names.

https://youtu.be/qV-Y29QAD74

Our next spotlight story was about one of the other animals that lives in the rainforest – in fact, there are nine different types of this animal living there. We decided to be animal detectives and played a game of Guess Who to find out which animal this might be. Using the final page from the Eric Carle book, I gave the children 4 clues:

*I have 4 legs. Lots of animals have 4 legs. Which one could it be? Do you need another clue?

*I have a long tail. This helps a bit, but it could be a crocodile or a monkey or one of the large cats…

*I have brown fur. Wait, it’s not the crocodile then!

*I live up in the trees. It must be one of the monkeys!

That’s right! I am a monkey!

Our next spotlight story was ‘Night Monkey, Day Monkey’ by Julia Donaldson and Lucy Richards. This delightful story introduces children to some of the differences between night and day as well as the idea of nocturnal animals. These ideas are presented through night monkey, and then day monkey’s, misconceptions which can be a little tricky to understand so please do revisit this story at home if you get the chance:

In our phonics lessons, we learnt another special friends sound: qu as in queen, quilt, quick and question. The sound is a bit like saying q and w together (i.e. qw) but it is written as qu.

Here is the picture prompt for this sound:

We also learnt another red word, the. As you may remember from last week, there are some words that you cannot Fred-talk and must just be learnt on sight instead.

In our maths lessons, we have been developing our understanding of numbers being composed of other numbers. We used the sentence ‘5 is made of something and something”…to talk about the different combinations of numbers that make up 5:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzqrkCAR40c

Finally, our babies have been enjoying lots of lovely bathtime this week – getting a good scrub and shampoo! We will be continuing to talk about our baby photos next week.

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