This week, we waved goodbye to the Yangtze River and the New Year celebrations in China as we set off on our magic carpet to visit the southern hemisphere of our wonderful world. We were looking for a place where we might find lots of thick, oozy mud as this is the next part of the ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ story. We are using the story as our travel guide this term as part of our ‘Out and About’ topic.
Have you ever walked through thick, oozy mud? I hope you were wearing your welly boots!
We decided to land next to a billabong in Australia. A billabong is the Australian word for an oxbow lake – in other words, a pond that is left behind when the river changes course and, at the edges, you often find lots of sticky mud! We visited the Marlgu billabong in Western Australia.
The little orange man brought us down to land safely on a boat with a roof to protect us from the hot Australian sunshine!
It was also lucky that we didn’t land in the billabong because many of us already knew what sort of animal might be lurking in the shallow water…that’s right, a crocodile!
Our first spotlight story was all about this fearsome creature! We read the story of ‘The Selfish Crocodile’ by Faustin Charles and Michael Terry and you can revisit it here:
MissEmsBookworm Read Aloud
This story helped us to remember how important it is to be kind and friendly and include everyone in our play. It also helped us to think about another way in which we can be healthy – as well as eating healthy foods – by looking after our teeth. We know that it is very important to brush our teeth twice a day, using a pea-sized amount of toothpaste. We will be learning more about looking after our teeth over the coming weeks.
Our next spotlight story was also about teeth – this time, a rather scary set of teeth! Even though Alan (the owner of the teeth) looks like a crocodile, he is actually an alligator. You can revisit the story (by Jarvis) below:
Although alligators and crocodiles are SIMILAR, they are not the same animal and you will not find alligators in Australia. We decided to do a little research to find out more about how alligators and crocodiles are different. To do our research, we used Google which, we learnt, is a search engine and can be found when we ‘go online’.
This is what we discovered:
Our final spotlight story of the week was definitely about a crocodile. At least, that’s what we thought when we started reading it…! There was a bit of a clue at the start of the story – can you remember what it was?
You can revisit ‘The Crocodile Who Didn’t Like Water’ by Gemma Merino here:
Give Us A Story!
This story prompted a very interesting conversation about whether or not dragons are real animals. Some of us thought that perhaps they did exist but are now extinct like dinosaurs. Others of us were not so sure. We decided to ask Google once again and discovered that an animal called a Komodo dragon does actually exist! It is a large lizard that lives in Indonesia and it is venomous!
In our phonics lessons this week, we learnt two new sounds – both of which are special friends: th (as in Thursday, thick, thin, thunder) and ch (as in chips, chimpanzee, China, children). When saying the sound ‘th’ you need to put your tongue in between your teeth and gently blow air through your teeth. This is a tricky sound to learn and can be easily muddled up with ‘f’ so please do spend some time practising the difference between saying Thursday and Fursday. When learning ‘ch’ the children often confuse train and chrain (especially as we often tell them that trains say choo, choo). Please do spend time helping them to distinguish between these sounds if they find this confusing.
Here are the picture prompts for these sounds:
Here is a video all about ‘th’ that might be helpful:
And here is one about ‘ch’:
We also made a startling discovery in our phonics lessons this week when, while we were getting ready to practise our Fred-talk with Fred, we came across a word that cannot be Fred-talked! Poor Fred had to be put away so we could learn that there are some words that cannot be Fred-talked and simply have to be learnt as whole words. We call these words red words and we say ‘you can’t Fred a red’! The first red word that we learnt is ‘I’ as in ‘I am Miss Cronin’. We will be learning lots more red words over the coming weeks.
Finally, in our maths lessons, we have been learning to order numbers by their relative quantities, singing the Numberblocks song ‘I’m bigger than you, diddly, diddly doo’ and ‘I’m smaller than you, diddly, diddly, doo’ to help us (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC6iqEz_28w).
We hope everyone is having a lovely weekend, see you on Monday!