Welcome back to the second half of the Spring Term.  We hope everyone had a lovely half term break.  It seems so hard to believe that we are now halfway through the Reception year!

Before the half term holiday, we took a break from our ‘Once Upon a Time’ topic to learn about Chinese New Year (which took place during the half term week on Friday 16th February).  We learnt about the story of the zodiac which explains how the 12 years of the zodiac cycle were named after the 12 different animals in a race.  The Jade Emperor decided that whichever animal won the race would have the first year named after it.  The second animal to cross the finish line would have the second year named after it, then the third, fourth, fifth and so on.  We all thought the rat was very sneaky.  Can you remember why?

You can watch a clip of the story here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/stories/lets-celebrate-chinesenewyearperformance

Weekend challenge: Have a look at the zodiac picture above.  Can you use the words first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth to talk about the picture and the story of the zodiac.  Find out which year you were born in and use the zodiac picture to find out which animal year you were born in. Write it down in a sentence (e.g. I was born in the year of the …). Can you find out when some of the people in your family were born?  This chart will help you find out about the grown-ups in your home:

In our phonics lessons, we have learnt 4 more sounds since the last blog post (two before the half term break and two this week).  Here are the mouth shapes, actions and picture prompts for the digraphs ‘th’, ‘ng’, ‘ai’ and ‘ee’.

There are actually two versions of the ‘th’ sound: a ‘voiced’ one and an ‘unvoiced’ one.  If you say the words ‘thin’ and ‘that’, you should notice the rather subtle difference (i.e. air being blown out or not).

In class, we talked about this sound being a little bit rude, in that you need to stick your tongue out – just a tiny bit when saying words like that, the and this – and a little bit further when saying words like thin, Thursday and thumb.

At this point, we would just like the children to be recognising this digraph as the one where they stick their tongue out and we are not too concerned about them hearing the difference between these two versions.  If you would like to explore the difference with them, however, please do so!

Here’s another way of explaining it!

Instead of the jolly phonics action, we decided to say the voiced sound ‘th’ and show a thumbs up.

The diagraph ‘ng’ is the sound you can here at the end of words such a ‘ring’ and ‘king’.  Please note I’ve included a sound clip for ‘ng’ this time, as I couldn’t find an example of the mouth shape!)

The diagraph ‘ai’ sounds like the name of the letter ‘a’ – prounounced ‘ay’.

This week, we read the fantastic story of ‘Grandpa’s magic slippers’ and we thought about what our own magic slippers or shoes might look like!

We looked at some weird and wonderful shoe designs, including some by Andy Warhol (see below) and those in a great little book by Linda O’Keeffe.  We had a go at drawing our own magic shoes and we will be continuing to work on these next week.

Please note, not all of the shoes we looked at for inspiration were high-heeled shoes aimed at women! We ensured, as always, that we also showed the children shoes that were gender-free and some that challenged their gender assumptions!

Finally, we have two number bags to catch up on for the numbers 15 and 14.  As always, our stars of the week did a fantastic job of filling up their numbers bags and presenting the contents to the class!

Our new number of the week has been chosen as number: