As part of our ‘Out and About’ topic this term, we will be finding out about plants and how they grow.  This week, we read the classic story of Jack and the Beanstalk and, the not-so-classic version, Jill and the Beanstalk.  The children did some lovely writing about the stories, thinking carefully about whether they needed to use the tricky word ‘he’ or ‘she’ in their work.  We now have our very own beanstalk growing in the book corner!

We also read the story of The Giant’s Stew and decided to make our own stew for the giant.  We hand-picked the vegetables to include and worked together to write a list of the ingredients:

2 carrots, 1 onion, 2 peppers, 1 broccoli shoot, 1 courgette, 2 sweetcorn (corn on the cob).

Next, we wrote a list of instructions:

Put them in the pot, mix them, cook them for 15 minutes.

Mmmm, delicious!

Weekend challenge: can you write a list of ingredients and instructions for a favourite recipe?

The next day, we had a message from the giant to say we hadn’t made enough stew to fill him up and we should double our recipe.  We wondered what ‘double’ might mean and after a little thinking time, we came up with a pretty good definition: “double means add the same again”.

So, we went back to our original recipe and carefully doubled all the different types of vegetables on our list of ingredients.

4 carrots, 2 onions, 4 peppers, 2 broccoli shoots, 2 courgettes, 4 sweetcorn.

We used unifix cubes and our fingers to help us work out these doubles.  We also worked out what double 3 is, what double 4 is and what double 5 is.

Can you work out which double is being shown in this photo?

We have been learning a doubling rhyme to help us remember our doubles.  It goes like this:

Double 1 is 2, tap it on your shoe,

Double 2 is 4, knock upon the door,

Double 3 is 6, do some finger clicks,

Double 4 is 8, hold your arms up straight.

Double 5 is 10, do it all again!

Repeat until:

Double 5 is 10, put them in the den.

In our phonics lessons this week, we learnt the sounds ‘y’ and ‘z’.  We also learnt the digraph ‘zz’ which has the same sound and action as ‘z’.  Here are the mouth shapes and actions for our new sounds:

Our new number of the week will be:

Weekend challenge: which 2 numbers can you add together to make the number 9? how many different ways can you add 2 numbers together to make the number 9? can you add 3 numbers together to make 9?

Finally, some of the girls finished off a very busy week with their first session of Miss Lizzi’s building club…

…while some of the boys, wrote secret messages in their makeshift den…