Hello!
Firstly an apology, the target sheets that went out on Wednesday evening were supposed to come home the Friday before half term, just after parent’s evening. Unfortunately they helpfully got ‘filed’ instead. Thank you to the mum that reminded us this week.
This week we have continued analysing the weather – enjoying our daily dose of the weather forecast carrying on with lots of weather activities in our weather station.
Our stories have been from the Elmer collection of books by David MacKee. They also make good links to our weather – there’s always a rain cloud looming for Elmer!
The children have really enjoyed trying to create their own colourful patchwork elephants…
Flooded the classroom creating various rain showers…
Made a collage our own Elmer for display…
In this weeks directed writing we have made story boards of the Elmer story and then used our story boards to re-write the story. We are moving writing on from words and captions to extended writing. Using all our sound knowledge to segment the words we need for our sentences. The children firstly need to think of a sentence, count the words in the sentence, start sounding out and segmenting the first word, write it, using a finger space and moving on to repeat for each word in the sentence. For lots this is a long and laborious process It really starts to get them going on writing independently.
We have finished our second set of sounds – since half term covering: ear, er, ur, air, ture, ow, oi, igh, oa all tricky ones to remember when reading and writing so any practice at home on these trickier sounds would be great!
Written all about Elmer and the weather…
Matched clothing to various weather types…
Used sound pegs to combine fine motor and segmenting words:
Used the numicon and peg boards to create patterns like Elmer’s. The children started on AB patterns ( ie red/blue/red/blue) and continued up to ABCD patterns. ie 4 colours in turn. This is a tricky skill when you are small.
Our directed maths task was a huge hit. We had dice, ( including an interactive one on the smart-board) grids of ten squares and we simply had to roll the dice and tick off the correct number of squares… the children had to : Recognise the numbers on the die, tell me the highest and lowest number that could be found on the die, work out how many more they need to roll to fill their grid and if they could, tell me how many more rolls of the dice they needed to do this, including what they would need to roll. Fun with lots of thinking too.
Number work continued with our thermometer making. The children have been very interested in temperature and regularly checking our weather station thermometer so we decided to make our own thermometers.
The children also found ways to make 10 using the numicon boards. They recorded their findings…
Using our Elmer’s to help with our number work was super – the children enjoyed working out how many footprints an elephant makes as he walks along! We will have them reciting the 4 x table before the year is out!!
As always, building and junk modelling is a massive hit everyday…
What fabulous World Book Day costumes – just fantastic – I’m sorry to have missed them. Well done Reception ( especially parents!) on brilliant character choices and superb costumes!
Have a great weekend Oak Class !