How exciting to see a little bit of snow this week!  Many of the children were in the nursery playground, enjoying mix-up time, when it started to snow.  Several rushed inside to grab a container of some sort to catch or scoop up the snowflakes, while others were happy just to catch them on their tongues!

Back in the classroom, I told the children the postman’s van had broken down that morning because of the snow and he had stopped me on my way into school to ask if the children might be able to help by delivering some parcels for him.  To make matters worse, the address labels had all come unstuck but, fortunately, he could remember which label went with which parcel and left us some clues so we could stick each label back onto the correct parcel.

Each parcel was a different 3D shape.  There was a cube, a sphere, a cuboid and a cylinder.

Can you use the clues below to work out which shape the postman was talking about?

1. It rolls on one side
2. It looks like a ball
3. It has six square faces
4. It has two square faces and 4 rectangular faces

Naturally, the children did a fantastic job of matching the labels to the correct parcels and then successfully delivered the parcels to the correct addresses in Oak Street (a row of houses that we currently have in our classroom!).

We were, of course, all very curious to find out what was actually inside the parcels and looked carefully at the shapes to make some sensible (and not so sensible!) guesses as to what might be inside.

Weekend challenge: can you remember what was inside the different parcels when we unwrapped them? What was inside the cube, cuboid, sphere and cylinder-shaped parcels? Have a look around your house and see if you can find anymore objects that are these 3D shapes. Perhaps you can find some other 3D shapes too…can you find out what they are called?  Make your own shape table (just like the one we have in our classroom). Write labels to show what the shapes are called.  Take a photo of it and bring it in (or email it) to show us!

We also learnt 3 new sounds this week.  They are ‘v’, ‘w’ and ‘x’.  For ‘v’, we learnt the jolly phonic action where we pretended to be holding the steering wheel while driving a van.

For ‘w’, we decided to use our own sign (pointing to a watch on our wrist) as this is the picture for ‘w’ on our sound mat.  The children are also aware of the jolly phonic action (blowing wind onto their palm) and we used this to check we were saying the ‘w’ sound correctly.

For ‘x’, we used the jolly phonics action where you pretend to take an x-ray photo:

Finally, our number of the week is number:

Weekend challenge: what does the number 4 mean to you? where can you find the number 4 in your street? Can you find the number 4 on the front of a bus, on a street sign or on a car license plate? How many different ways can you make the number 4? Which number comes before/after number 4?  What is double 4?