Our topic in Oak Class this term will be ‘Message in a Bottle’.  We will be reading all sorts of fishy and pirate tales and using our imaginations to sail the high seas.  You can download our new topic booklet here which will give you some ideas for the sorts of activities you might like to do at home to further support your child’s interest and learning within this topic.

Given that our whole school theme at St. Matthews this term will be friendship, we decided to start our topic by revisiting the story of the ‘Rainbow Fish’.  The children are always gripped by the story and its simple message of making friends through sharing. We decided to see if we could be Rainbow Fish ourselves this week by saying things like “yes, you can borrow the pink pen” instead of “no, I had it first” and “yes, you can have one of my red lego pieces” instead of “but I need it”.  We are working on a Rainbow Fish display for the classroom and we will be looking out for examples of these kinds of ‘friendship’ words to add to it over the coming weeks.

We also read the story of ‘Something Else’ which encouraged us to think about differences between us and our friends.  We realised that we already have lots of friends who are very different to us.  Some of our friends speak different languages to us.  Some of them like to eat different foods.  Others are even girls!

Of course, we have also been very busy looking after our chick eggs.  We are doing a great job of keeping them safe and warm in the incubator and we have been carefully counting down the days on our 21 day number chart.  Yesterday (Friday) was day 11.  Can you work out how many days there are left until our chick eggs begin to hatch?

We also watched an incredible animation of the growth of the chicks within the eggs during the 21 days.  You can watch it here again:

Weekend Challenge:  can you find out what the chicks start to have on day 12 and on day 13?  Write down a sentence or two to explain what they now have.

Our Star of the Week did yet another fantastic job of filling her number bag with all sorts of things related to the number 15.  She even included a tea bag packet with instructions suggesting the tea bag be steeped for 15 minutes, coins adding up to 15 pence and a jar containing 15g of peppercorns!

Weekend Challenge: how about setting yourself some time challenges.  For example, what can you do in 1 minute? How many toys can you pick up? How far can you run? How many star jumps can you do? What other time challenges could you set yourself?

Our new number of the week has been chosen as:

Within our phonics lessons this week, we revised the digraphs ‘ai’ and ‘ee’.  We also had another look at how to form the letter ‘a’ as many of us find this quite tricky.  Remember, if you are practising this one at home, start with a curly c, go up to the top, back down and add a tail.  Don’t take your pencil off because it is not an ‘o’ with a tail.

Here the CBeebies show ‘Get Squiggling’ shows you how to do it (skip to 2:07 for the ‘a’ letter a bit):

Finally, we had a bit of a treat this week, with a special music lesson.  Here we are with Soo, our music teacher, learning a turn-taking song. We are very much looking forward to our next lesson!