This week, we read the story of A Chair for Baby Bear.  It’s such an enjoyable story and tells the tale of Baby Bear’s search for a new chair after Goldilocks has been to visit.

You can hear the story being retold in this CBeebies clip:

The children were then challenged to design their very own chairs for baby bear and to make their designs using junk materials.  They had to think carefully about the shapes of the different materials they used, considering both stability and comfort.

Here are the finished products – quite impressive I’m sure you’ll agree!  Several of our mini-mes also enjoyed trying out the various chairs which led to lots of imaginative make-believe play!

In our maths lessons this week, we have been linking our whole school theme of fairness to our number work.  In other words, we have been thinking about how to make things fair when sharing out equally.

Weekend challenge: How many different ways can you share out 10 sweets between 2 people? Draw a picture or some number sentences to show the different ways. How many of the ways are fair? Can you find a way to share out 10 sweets between 3 people – try and make it fair, does it work? Why not?

In our phonics lessons this week we learnt the digraph ‘oo’ which makes two sounds; sometimes a short sound and sometimes a long one.  The trouble is, you can’t tell which sound it’s making just by looking at it. You have to try both and see which one sounds best and makes sense within the word.  For example, it makes a long sound in the word m-oo-n but a short sound in the word b-oo-k. Here is the action to help us remember ‘oo’ and distinguish between the two versions:

Here is the mouth shape for the long ‘oo’ sound:

And the short ‘oo’ sound:

And here are the picture prompts we used for our sentence writing:

One of our previous Stars of the Week did a fantastic job of presenting his 16 number bag:

Our new number of the week was chosen as number:

Finally, one of the carpet sessions we enjoy most weeks is based around the CBeebies series ‘Get Squiggling’.  The children use their listening and understanding skills to follow a series of instructions to complete a drawing on their whiteboards.  They are encouraged to think carefully about the different sorts of lines they use (e.g. straight, curved, zigzag) to complete their drawings and to add extra details if they wish.  This week, the children were challenged to draw a pirate picture and all did a fantastic job of course!