Welcome back to a new term and a new year at school. And a very Happy New Year to anyone I haven’t yet seen in person. It was lovely to welcome such enthusiastic and excited children back to school last week and hear all about their Christmas holidays.

This term, our learning will be centred around the topic ‘Out & About’. We will be exploring our wonderful world through storytelling and outdoor adventures. We will also be taking a sensory journey on our magic carpet visiting places all around the world, inspired by the story of ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’. This wonderful classic by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury was our first spotlight story of the term and you can revisit it below with the author himself:

Our first stop on the magic carpet took us to the grasslands of Africa where we landed in the middle of the Serengeti Nature Reserve in Tanzania. We read the story of ‘We’re Going on a Lion Hunt’ to help us think about the sort of animals we might find in this vast landscape and we quickly realised that this story is SIMILAR to the original Michael Rosen book! In fact, we learnt that it is a different VERSION of the bear hunt book.

We also learnt that the Serengeti is not just home to big animals like lions, giraffes and zebras, but to very small animals as well. In fact, it is full of insects because grasslands provide a good place for them to lay their eggs. For example, this beautiful butterfly is called a Swallowtail and can be found all over East Africa:

Many of the children already knew that butterflies do not begin their lives with these beautiful patterned wings but, instead, start their lives as caterpillars. We re-read one of our favourite stories, to remind ourselves about the life-cycle of a butterfly:

This story always prompts lots of conversations about healthy and unhealthy foods and I was so impressed by the children’s already impressive knowledge of those foods that can be eaten everyday and those that should only be eaten occasionally.

We also agreed that if there is a vegetable or fruit that you don’t think you like, it is often a good idea to try it (or try it again) as you might be surprised to discover that you like it after all, just like Oliver in the story of Oliver’s Vegetables:

In our phonics lessons, we learnt 4 further sounds: j, y, v and w. Here are the picture prompts and handwriting sayings for these:

Learning the sound j gave us the perfect excuse to have a go at making some jelly and, of course, this linked in very nicely with our conversations about healthy and unhealthy foods. We all agreed jelly is only something we should eat occasionally, certainly not everyday for breakfast! We were all fascinated by the way in which the jelly cubes changed from a solid to a liquid as they melted and dissolved in the hot water. Once in the fridge, we had to be very patient and wait overnight for the liquid jelly to turn back into a solid, ready to eat at our jelly party. Most of us thought the jelly was y-u-m!

In our maths lessons, we have been learning about composition; that numbers are made up of other numbers. To help us with this concept, we learnt to use the words PART and WHOLE within the whole/part Numberblocks song (e.g. “one is a part of me and one is a part of me and the whole of me is two”). Why not come up with your own numberblocks songs at home? We also loved playing with the Mr. Potato head family this week and this helped us to think about parts making up a whole.

On the carpet, we made a class book all about the number 4. We worked with our partners to arrange 4 squares in different ways – developing our understanding that the whole remains the same no matter the arrangement of its parts.

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