This week, we continued to find out more about creatures that hatch from eggs and started with the delightful story of ‘The Odd Egg’ by Emily Gravett which you can revisit here:

Next, we read the story of The Crocodile Who Didn’t Like Water by Gemma Merino which also has a surprising ending:

And finally, we read the story of Alan’s Big, Scary Teeth by Jarvis:

Because Alan’s name starts with an ‘a’, we wondered if Alan might be an alligator, rather than a crocodile.  We decided to find out a bit more about the difference between crocodiles and alligators and, after some quick Googling by Mrs Mooney, we discovered several interesting facts about these reptiles.  We were especially amazed to discover that they have 60 and 80 teeth, far more than our 20!  We thought it must take Alan a very long time to brush his teeth!

In our R.E. lesson, we learnt that Christians believe God created our world and all of the amazing things we find in it.  We watched a video about God creating the earth which you can revisit here:

Afterwards, we took a walk in the winter sunshine to have a look at our wonderful world.  We spotted so many things that we had not noticed before…a jet plane stream, ivy growing up and around the bark of a tree, tiny pine cones which had fallen from a pine tree, daisies growing in the grass, squelchy mud puddles and the moon in the sky!

We also noticed that we each had a very tall shadow which followed us all around the field!  It only fell on one side of us and we learnt this is because shadows are formed when we stand in front of the sun and block the rays of light.

Back inside, Mrs Warner invited us into the big hall for another Assembly and we learnt more about what life was like in Jesus’ time.  We found out about the sort of house that Jesus would have lived in, the sort of clothes he would have worn and the sort of food he would have eaten.  We were amazed to discover that only some boys (not girls) went to school and only until the age of 12.

In our maths lessons this week, we have been focusing on comparing quantity and we have been thinking about the ideas of ‘too many’, ‘not enough’ and ‘equal’.  Stanley, Gruffy and Fred each wanted to eat some sweets but they needed the children’s help to make sure everyone had an equal amount.  Luckily, the children were able to say who had too many, who had not enough and how to make things equal!

Finally, we learnt three new sounds in our phonics lessons this week.  These sounds are  ‘special friends’, just like the ones we learnt last week, where two letters sit together to make one sound.

The special friends we learnt are ‘ch’, ‘qu’ and ‘ng’ – (‘ng’ has a saying that goes with it: ‘thing on a string’):

Have a lovely weekend everyone, see you on Monday!

A very happy new year to everyone and a very warm welcome back to a new term at school.  The children have returned full of smiles, enthusiasm and news of their Christmas holidays and we have very much enjoyed catching up with them all.  They all look a little bit taller too! This term, our topic will be ‘Out of the Egg’ and our learning will be inspired by reading lots of stories about creatures that come out of eggs.

This week, we read a firm favourite; the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, which you can revisit here:

We also spent some time thinking about why the Very Hungry Caterpillar had such an awful stomachache.  We decided it was because he had eaten too much.  But we also wondered if he may have eaten the wrong sorts of foods.  We all agreed that if you eat lots and lots of unhealthy food, like sweets and cakes, it is not good for you and can make you poorly.  The children told me that you can eat sweets but only “sometimes” and “you need to put them away for later”.  We played a sorting game where we fed the Very Hungry Caterpillar the healthy foods and put the unhealthy foods in the sweet box.

We are also working on a Very Hungry Caterpillar display which is coming along nicely…and we explored colour mixing of yellow and blue paint to create the green for the caterpillar’s body:

Outside, we were delighted to discover that, over the holidays, some new playground markings had been painted in our garden!  You can see our new number rocket and our alphabet caterpillar in the background below.  We also have a fantastic new track for our bikes!  Our car tyres had been moved around, to make way for the new markings and, while moving them back, we were amazed to discover long pieces of ice had formed inside them!

Mrs Warner invited us into the big hall for an Assembly today and we learnt about the visit of the three wise men to baby Jesus in the stable.  She told us about a mean and nasty person called King Herod and explained that Mary & Joseph took baby Jesus to a country called Egypt to keep him safe from Herod.

Finally, we learnt two new sounds in our phonics lessons this week.  These sounds are different to the sounds we have learnt so far as they are digraphs or, as we call them, ‘special friends’.  Sometimes, two letters sit together to make one sound.  This is known as a digraph.

The special friends we learnt are ‘sh’ and ‘th’.

You might like to rewatch this video to check how we say these sounds:

Have a lovely weekend everyone!

We could not be prouder of the children this week as they rehearsed and performed their amazing Christmas show; ‘Santa’s Workshop’.  I think we can all agree that their singing, dancing and smiling sprinkled some much needed Christmas joy throughout our appreciative audience.  A huge thank you to our parents for these incredible costumes and for your support both at home and on the day.

Show photos courtesy of Mrs H – thank you!

Here are our audience stage reviews (as reported via the performers):

Despite all the excitement of the show, we also took some time this week to remember the story of Baby Jesus and why we celebrate Christmas in the first place.  We read the story of ‘The Nativity’ as told by May Eliot and Richard Johnson, which you can revisit here:

We also managed to squeeze in a couple of phonics lessons (in fact, there are always loud complaints from the children if we have to miss these lessons!).  We learnt two new sounds.  These are the final single sounds we will be learning.

images from http://www.slideshare.net/msg719/abc-pronunciary

And here we are practising our CVC sound blending with our carpet partners, using our reading sticks to carefully ‘Fred-talk’ the words on each page:

Have a lovely weekend everyone and see you on Monday!

What a lot of wonderfully frosty mornings we have had this week!  There has been much talk of helping parents to scrape ice off car windscreens and of the excitement of scooting through crunchy grass before school.  It seemed quite fitting then that our first Spotlight Story was Stickman by Julia Donaldson which you can revisit here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhfLzw9Gf6Q

On Monday morning, our school field looked almost as snowy as the front cover of the story, as it was covered in a white layer of frost!  Of course, we simply had to head out onto the field to investigate and, while we were there, we kept our eyes open for Stick Man and his family.

Photos of our expedition onto the frosty field to follow…

While on the field, we found lots and lots of Stick People of all different shapes and sizes!  We decided to rescue them from the field and brought them back to the classroom where we used googly eyes and fabrics to really bring them to life.

We also enjoyed selecting sticks to represent Stick Man, his lady-love and his three children.  We used lots of comparative language such as ‘biggest’, ‘smallest’, ‘bigger than’ and ‘smaller than’ as we ordered the sticks by size.  Then we had a go at choosing some sticks to represent the people in our families!

In the story of Stick Man, we discovered our word of the week: lonely.  We decided that this means “feeling sad because you are alone”.  In the story, Stick Man is lonely because he is lost and he feels much better when it makes it home to the family tree.

In our next Spotlight Story, ‘On Sudden Hill’ by Linda Sarah & Benji Davies, we learned about a different type of loneliness.  This time, we learned that you might feel lonely if your friend starts to play with another friend.  You might feel alone because you are left out.  And you might feel angry because you are jealous.  We really loved this story, especially when we discovered that a two-by-two rhythm can become a three-by-three rhythm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESsRgNVRw68

Our final Spotlight Story was Beegu by Alexis Deacon.  Beegu was lonely because she was lost, just like Stick Man, but also because she felt different and no one seemed to want to be her friend until she came across some “small ones”.

We also watched and really enjoyed this BBC video about what can make you feel lonely and what you can do if you feel like this.

Our Picture News focus this week encouraged us to think about whether the festive period is a happy time for everyone.  We compared two very different pictures of a Christmas dinner to help us understand that, for some people, Christmas can be a lonely time.

images from google.co.uk and theguardian.com

Next, we looked at a drawing by an illustrator called Lucy Burvant.  The drawing is called ‘Christmas Kindness’ and she drew it to encourage people to think about the words of kindness we can all use at Christmas time to help people who might be feeling lonely.

When looking at the picture, we thought “both of them are lonely”, “the little girl is trying to make him feel better” and “she looks like a fairy or an angel”.  We also talked about the words of kindness that the little girl might be saying to the creature on top of the lamppost and, of course, we came up with some lovely ideas: “I will help you to feel better”, “come down and have this candy cane” and “come down, you can have this treat”.  Well done Reception, you are all so kind and friendly.

In our R.E. lessons, we have been learning about how Christians prepare for Christmas during Advent.  We have been finding out what each candle on an Advent wreath represents (hope, peace, joy and love) and sharing our excitement at opening the first few doors on our own Advent calendars.

We also read a story about the smallest fir tree in the forest who felt very lonely because all the other trees had been taken into the town to be decorated as proper Christmas trees.  The small fir tree had not yet grown tall enough to go into town. Luckily, some of the animals in the forest found him and made sure he was not lonely on Christmas day.  This was a really delightful story and possibly published a while ago as I can’t seem to find any record of it online!  I will keep looking and update this page if I have any luck, as it was one of the loveliest Christmas stories I have come across in a while.

Just after we had finished reading the story, the children noticed a small tree had appeared in our classroom!  We decided it was big enough to be decorated and quickly set to work, with every child putting a decoration on the tree or helping to string up the lights.  Mrs Mooney came up with an ingenious way of putting the lights on the tree: she asked 4 children to spread out in a line, holding the string off lights (see below) and then they followed her around the tree several times until the string had been strung!

In our Computing lesson this week, we had a go at decorating Christmas trees using our fantastic mouse-skills to select and move decorations onto a tree.  You can have a go at home too by clicking here.

In phonics this week, we learnt three new sounds: v, y and w.  When saying v and w, be careful not to say ‘vuh’ and ‘wuh’.

images from https://www.slideshare.net/msg719/abc-pronunciary

Have a lovely weekend and see you on Monday everyone!

We have loved looking after our visitor, Space Teddy, this week; making adaptations to his spacesuit and adding extra rocket boosters to his spaceship to make sure he gets back home to the Planet Zog safely.

Even though Space Teddy speaks in a different language, we know that you don’t have to speak the same language as someone to be friends with them and that there are always lots of other ways to communicate!  Giving someone a lovely smile is certainly a good start!

Our Spotlight Story this week was ‘Night Monkey, Day Monkey’ which you can revisit in this YouTube video.  Night Monkey and Day Monkey sees things quite differently but, luckily, they do speak the same language so they are able to use their words to help each other understand their different worlds.

This story led to some very interesting conversations about night and day; we learnt that the earth is turning as it travels around the sun and that it is daytime for half of the earth when it is facing the sun, while it is nighttime for the other half which is facing away from the sun.  That’s why it’s nighttime in Australia when it’s daytime in Raynes Park!

We are starting to discover that another way to communicate and to get your message across is to write something down.  This is exactly what Space Teddy decided to do!  He wrote his message down on a piece of paper and, would you believe it, the language he actually speaks is subitising fingers!  In Reception we are, of course, fluent in this language so we quickly worked out that Space Teddy’s message was 4, 2, 3, 3, 1.

This seemed like some sort of code which we would need to crack, so we searched on Google for a codebreaker and look what we found!

We used the codebreaker to help us work out that the word in Space Teddy’s message was…

As it turns out, Space Teddy wanted to taste the most delicious food on Planet Earth which is, of course, jelly!  So, we quickly set to work, washing our hands, cutting up the jelly cubes, adding hot water and then cold water, mixing carefully with a spoon, pouring it into jelly moulds and, finally, popping it in the fridge.

We watched very carefully to see what happened when the hot water was added to the jelly cubes.  I was so impressed by the language the children used, the explanations they gave for what was happening and the links they made between their previous experiences and this one (e.g. it’s like what happens with a bath bomb).

Although we absolutely loved making the jelly, it was even better to eat it!  And Space Teddy joined in too, eating his jelly through a straw, so he didn’t have to take off his spacesuit helmet.

Would you believe it, but one of our sounds this week was indeed j…for jelly!  What are the chances 😉  Here are the three sounds that we learnt:

When learning ‘h’, we made sure we were not saying ‘huh’ and we put our hand in front of our mouth to feel the air as we said this sound.  When writing, be sure to come all the way down the horse’s long neck, otherwise you may end up writing ‘n’.

The ‘r’ sound comes through our mouths (and not from our throats, i.e. it is not a roar) and you will feel your tongue curling near the roof of your mouth.

The final sound, ‘j’ often gets confused with ‘i’.  You might like to have a look at these sounds side by side.  We used the writing repeater to do this and noticed that ‘j’ has a long tail while ‘i’ is much shorter.

Here are the mouth shapes for these sounds:

from https://www.slideshare.net/msg719/abc-pronunciary

We have also been busy using our ‘Fred-talk’ to practise reading lots of CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words.  We used the word machine to generate words for us which we then read and had a go at writing.  Why not have a go at doing this at home – you could try and make the different words using the sounds in your sound & word pot.  If you do not have this yet, please be sure to send in your book bag next week so we can send yours home.

Have a lovely weekend everyone, keep warm and see you on Monday!

This week, we continued with our learning about the past and, in particular, we were inspired by our mix-up play with Nursery, who have been learning all about space!  We watched an old, black and white video of a man called Neil Armstrong as he took his first steps (and the first steps of anyone) on the moon, over 50 years ago!

We talked about everything we already know about space and I was so impressed by the children’s existing knowledge (for example, we know that the moon sometimes looks like a smile, that some planets have 2 moons and that Pluto used to be a planet but is not anymore!).

Our first Spotlight Story was Q Pootle 5 by Nick Butterworth which you can revisit here:

This story led to some very interesting conversations about aliens and whether or not they are real…!

After reading the story, we noticed a visitor in the classroom who we had never seen before.  No one seemed to know where he had come from, so we asked him who he was.  It was very difficult to understand him, as he seemed to be speaking in a different, alien language but, we remembered our kind and friendly good manners and we knew to make him feel welcome despite our language differences.  Eventually, we were able to work out that the visitor had arrived from a planet called Zog.  His spaceship had broken down while travelling through space and he had crash landed at St. Matthew’s!  His spaceship had broken into a million pieces and he needed our help to build a new one.

Thankfully, the children were more than happy to help and set to work building him a new spaceship and spacesuit.  Well done Reception, your teamwork, problem-solving skills and creative thinking was out of this world!

Our next spotlight story was ‘The Way Back Home’ by Oliver Jeffers about a boy who gets stuck on the moon with a martian who is also lost in space.  Together, they manage to help each other to find their ways back home.  You can revisit the story here…

We also very much enjoyed this Planet song…

Finally, we learnt three new sounds: f (which is a stretchy sound), e (a bouncy sound) and l (also a stretchy sound).  When practising these sounds, please be careful not to say ‘fuh’ and ‘luh’.  If you are unsure, do rewatch this video.

images from https://www.slideshare.net/msg719/abc-pronunciary

We also practised lots of ‘Fred-talk’.  This means, we practised sounding out lots of words, saying the sounds in sequence and then blending them together.  We really enjoyed using this word making machine which helped us to understand how to do this.  We loved pulling the different levers to change the first and final sounds.  Why not have a go at using the word machine together at home!

Have a lovely weekend everyone & see you on Monday.

This week, we took some time to think about Remembrance Day. We talked about the past and how grown-ups were once children too!  We know this can be quite tricky to understand, so we used our spotlight stories to help us.  We read two stories which were both written by Martin Waddell, who also wrote Owl Babies and many other familiar stories.

First, we read the story of Grandma’s Bill which is about a boy called Bill who is looking through an old photo album with his grandmother.  She explains that his grandfather was also called Bill and, together, they look at photos of his life.  We could see that the Grandma in the story was once a young girl herself and, as the story went on, she became older in the different photos until she looked like the lady on the front cover.

image from amazon.co.uk

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a video of this story for you to revisit at home but here’s a video of our second spotlight story; Once There Were Giants:

video from youtube – Grandma Fran

This story helped us to begin to understand that everyone starts their life as a baby and eventually grows into a grown-up.  We looked at a photo of Miss Cronin as a baby and all agreed that she does not look like that anymore!  Several parents were kind enough to send in photos of themselves when they were younger and their children did some excellent talking, explaining that this is what their parent looked like in the past.

Some families sent in photos of older generations, such as grandparents and great-grandparents.  These photos were more likely to be in black and white and we learnt that this is because the cameras that took photos in the past were not able to capture colours – even though the colours would have been in the world, just as they are today!

We heard some incredible stories about relatives who had been alive during World War II and the children spoke about them with such a sense of pride:

• a great-grandfather who was a test pilot for the RAF and was the first British man to go faster than the speed of sound in an airplane.
• a great-grandfather who served in the Royal Navy and was awarded several medals for his brave service.
• a great-grandmother who ran a steel company taking over from the men.
• a great-grandmother and a great-grandfather, both flying during World War II.

We learnt that the 11th day of the 11th month is a special day called Remembrance Day when everyone, all around the country, takes time to remember people who have died in wars.  On Thursday, we joined the rest of the school at a special mass for Remembrance Day and, at exactly 11am, we stopped playing and talking to be silent for 2 minutes.  This CBeebies clip helped us to understand how sad and dark wars are and why poppies are used to help us remember those who have died.

video from youtube: CBeebies channel

Each class made a poppy wreath which was handed to Mother Helen during our special mass.  We painted sections of egg boxes red and then added a black spot in the middle.  These were then carefully stuck onto a green hoop.  You can see a photo of the wreaths in this week’s school newsletter.

Our new sounds this week were three more bouncy sounds: k, u and b.

images from https://www.slideshare.net/msg719/abc-pronunciary

Our handwriting focus this week was the letter m: we practised writing m using the caption ‘Maisie, mountain, mountain’.  If you are practising this letter at home, please don’t forget Maisie!  This letter starts at the top, comes down Maisie, then back up over two mountains.  It does not start at the bottom of the first mountain!

And in Maths, we started to explore the stem sentence “____ has more than ____”.  We were joined by Gruffy, who is friends with Stanley, our sloth.  They had been sharing out chocolate cookies and could not agree on who had more.  So, of course, we stepped in to help them work out the problem!

In R.E., we listened to the story of the Angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary and in ICT, we practised our mouse skills, playing this subitising game.

Have a lovely weekend everyone and see you on Monday.

It was lovely to see the children back at school this week and we hope you all had an enjoyable half term!

Before we left for the break, we re-planted our beans in some soil and watered them well.

We couldn’t quite believe it when we returned on Monday and discovered they had grown almost as high as the ceiling!  Perhaps they really were magic beans 😉

Our growing beanstalks inspired some of our maths work this week: we added the correct amount of leaves to each of our previously ordered beanstalks, demonstrating our understanding of numerals as representations of quantity.

And we continued to practise our subitising skills:

image from CBeebies on Facebook

We have been saying “Do not count, see the amount”! which you can practise in this Numberblocks episode.

Our Spotlight Story this week was the story of Rama and Sita which you can revisit on the CBeebies website.  Scroll down to the Diwali story at the bottom of the page.

image from Amazon.co.uk

We also found out how this Hindu festival of light is celebrated; with diya lamps, special clothes, Mendhi patterns, Rangoli patterns, Diwali cards and lots of sweets!  And we met Jessica who explained how she celebrates Diwali with her family.

In our music lesson this week, we learnt that the beat helps us to think about how fast or slow the music is.  We listened to the song ‘Celebration’ by Kool and the Gang and moved our bodies in time to the beat.  We talked about what a celebration is and decided it’s “when everyone gets together to have a party” – just like Jessica does when celebrating Diwali!

We used an online metronome to listen carefully to very slow beats (30 BPM) and very fast beats (244 BPM).  We were able to play Celebration at the same time as the metronome to try and work out how many BPM there are in this particular song.  I was so impressed by the children’s listening skills, as some of them were able to say that the beat on the metronome was too small (slow) or too big (fast)!!  A quick Google search revealed that Celebration is actually 121BPM and we all agreed that that sounded about right!

We also noticed that Diwali is often celebrated with firework displays and many of us shared that we were looking forward to seeing fireworks this week on Bonfire Night!

We watched some amazing firework displays on youtube including this one from New Year’s Eve in London in 2018/2019:

Next, we read another Julia Donaldson favourite: The Smartest Giant in Town, which you can revisit here.  We all agreed that George the Giant is a very kind and friendly person.

As we got to the end of the story, we discovered another letter had been left for us in the back of the book!  It was from the giant once again – this time, he was looking for a new pair of sandals and wondered if we might have any suitable ones in our new shoe shop.  Unfortunately, we didn’t think we had a pair large enough in stock so, instead, several of us quickly set to work drawing, designing and creating a pair that would be big enough for a giant.  Well done Reception, you are so kind and friendly!

In other news, we are so excited to announce that our beans have started to grow!

And in our phonics lessons, we have been being learning three new sounds: d, t and i.  Please do keep practising all six of the sounds we have learnt to date…thank you!

The picture prompts this week are “d-d-dinosaur”, “t-t-tower” and “i-i-insect”.

Don’t forget to check that you are saying the sounds correctly:

Or say the sounds together in the mirror, checking that your mouth shapes are correct.

Our Spotlight Story this week was Jack and the Beanstalk and we particularly enjoyed this lift-the-flap version by Nick Sharratt which you can revisit here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlpzbFS8WvQ

After we had read the story, we noticed some rather strange happenings in the classroom…first, a beanstalk appeared in our quiet room and started to grow up the wall!   Mr Norris came to have a look as, by mid-week, it had grown through the ceiling and he thought he’d better get up on the roof to see if it had gone right through and up into the clouds!

The next day, a parcel was delivered to the school office addressed to Reception class.  We opened it up to discover a letter and a package of beans!  This is what the letter said:

We decided that this letter could only have come from the friendly giant (not from the one who doesn’t like children) and we quickly set to work planting our beans.  We learnt that beans need water and sunlight to grow into beanstalks, so we put our beans on the windowsill and made sure they had enough water.  We didn’t use any soil yet, as we wanted to be able to get a really good view of the beans as the shoots and roots start to appear.  We can’t wait to see how tall our beanstalks will become!

We also watched a time-lapse video of a bean growing into a beanstalk and we were fascinated to discover that roots are just like straws that the plant uses to drink water from the soil!

This week was also an important week because we started our phonics lessons!

We learnt the sounds that the letters m, a and s make.  We will be learning three new sounds each week so please do make sure you practise these at home with your child.  Whenever we learn a new sound, we start with a picture prompt, in other words, something that starts with the sound and helps us to put the sound into context.

We tell the children that the sound is ‘hidden’ behind the picture and turn the card over to reveal the sound itself:

If you are unsure how to say the say sounds – please do rewatch this video:

Or you might find these mouth shape pictures helpful:

To help your child practise the sounds, you could play a simple game of memory: use 12 pieces of paper and write the letters on each so you have 4 cards with m on them, 4 with a on them and 4 with s on them.  Place them face down on a table and muddle them up.  Take turns to turn over two cards at a time.  What are the sounds?  Are they the same? Keep them if they are the same, turn them back over if not.  Carry on until all the cards have been picked up.  The winner is the one with the most cards.

Or you could play a sound hunt game – how many things can you find in the house that start with m…or a…or s.  If you are in the car, remember ‘I spy’ is always a brilliant way to practice hearing and distinguishing initial sounds in words.

If you have bath crayons, try writing these on the tiles at bath-time and give your child a spray bottle to spray the sounds as they say them.  This is also fun in a driveway or on the pavement with chalks.

If your child is already recognising these sounds confidently, they can have a go at writing them correctly.  We teach the children sayings to help them learn the correct letter formation.  For example, for the letter m, we say ‘Maisie, mountain, mountain’.

This video explains this a little better:

Finally, in our maths lessons this week, we have been practising our subitising skills.  This means when you are able to look at a group of objects and say how many there are without counting them.  When numbers are small, like 1, 2, 3, it is fairly easy to do this. Apparently, 3 year olds are able to subitise up to three objects while 4 years can subitise up to 4.  This correlation does not continue beyond 4 however!  We used a 1-3 die to play this beanstalk game and it was lots of fun! The children rolled the die, looked at the dots, but reminded themselves that they ‘do not (need to) count!’ and then put the correct number of beans into their pots.  Some of the children were even able to scoop up the correct number of beans without re-counting them.  The winner was the person with the most beans at the end of the game.

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