Welcome back everyone and Happy New Year!  We hope the Christmas break was a restful and peaceful time for all.  The children have come back to school full of enthusiasm for the term ahead and were all keen to get straight back into their learning and playing.

Our topic this term is ‘Out and About’.  We’ll be exploring and investigating the great outdoors, including any early signs of Spring, and the features of our local environment and community.  Look out for the topic booklet which will give more details and provide you with some ideas for activities and outings that you might like to do at home.  The booklet will be posted here on our blog in the coming weeks.

Our new role-play area reflects a feature of our local area that we already know quite a bit about, having posted our own letters and met a real-life postman only last term.  We have already been busy writing letters, buying stamps at the counter, posting letters and delivering them.  We would be grateful for any donations of used or unused envelopes to support our play and learning in our post office.  Also, if anyone has a play cash register that they no longer need, we would be happy to give it a good home!  Thank you.

This week, we read the story of the Jolly Postman who delivers letters throughout fairytale land to the different characters from those classic stories.  The children’s knowledge of fairytales was really quite impressive with many of them able to identify the characters by the clues given in the text (e.g. a ‘Grandma’ with big teeth and a giant at the top of a beanstalk).

As the children learnt all the phase 2 sounds last term, we have now moved onto phase 3 of the Letters & Sounds programme.

The first sound in phase 3 is j…which is for jelly of course!

“Jelly on a plate, jelly on a plate, wibble wobble wibble wobble, jelly on a plate!”

The children all made their own jelly this week.  They looked carefully at how the jelly cubes change first into a liquid and then back into a solid.  They used their own words to describe their observations and make predictions about what they thought would happen next.

How to make jelly:

1. Wash your hands (“otherwise you get germs”)
2. Break up the jelly cubes (“they are squidgy and sticky!”)
3. Pour in boiling hot water (“you need a grown up”)
4. Mix carefully (“the jelly is going into the water!”, “the cubes are getting tiny”)
5. Add cold water and mix again (“be careful, not too quick!”)
6. Put it in the fridge (“it’s not ready, it needs to be cold”)
7. Eat your jelly (“it’s yummy!”)

Finally, we are going to have a different ‘number of the week’ each week this term to support our learning and understanding of number and how the number system works.

All next week, our number of the week will be:  

Weekend challenge: ask your child to tell you something about the number 5 (e.g. have they seen the number somewhere before, perhaps on your front door or on the front of a bus), can they collect 5 items (e.g. toys, socks, spoons), if you have 2 spoons can they tell you how many more spoons you would need to make 5, etc.), how many different ways can you make the number 5?