A very happy new year to everyone and welcome back to school! The children certainly seem to have come back having had a super break, feeling rested and ready to launch themselves back into lots of busy playing and learning.
This term our topic will be ‘Once Upon a Time’. We will be immersing ourselves in the wonderful world of fairytales and reading lots of well-known stories. This week, we started to have a think about some of the key features of fairytales, i.e. the sort of characters and settings we might expect to find in these types of books.
We all agreed we might well find a princess or two, perhaps a prince, a dragon and most likely, a big bad wolf! To challenge the children’s assumptions about what might happen to these characters we read two (less well-known) stories that contain rather unexpected twists! Both are well-worth a re-read if you happen to come across them (the first can be found in Raynes Park Library and we have copies of the second in school).
As the children have now learnt all the phase 2 sounds, we moved on this week into phase 3 of the Letters & Sounds programme that we follow.
At this point, please take a moment to sit down with your child and have a look over the phase 2 sound mat (that we gave you at parents evening). Your child should now feel confident recognising all of these sounds.
The first sound in phase 3 is j…which is for jelly of course!
“Wibble wobble wibble wobble jelly on a plate!”
We couldn’t resist the opportunity to make (and of course eat!) some jelly of our own.
Weekend challenge: Can you remember how we made our jelly? Can you write a list of the things we needed to make our jelly?
1.Break up the jelly cubes (“they are squidgy!”)
2.Pour in boiling hot water (“be careful, it is very hot!”)
3.Mix carefully (“the water is turning orange!”)
4.Add cold water and mix again (“it is not hot anymore”)
5.Put in the fridge (“we need to make it like jelly again!”)
6.Eat your jelly (“it’s yummy!”)
Here are the actions and mouth shapes for ‘j’ and the two other sounds we learnt this week (‘v’ and ‘w’).
We have also started learning the tricky words for phase 3. This week we learnt ‘he‘ and ‘she‘. We will be adding more tricky words to your child’s word pots over the coming weeks, so please continue to return the pots in your book bag each week, thank you!
Our Star of the Week did a fantastic job of filling up his number bag with all things to do with the number 12; we had an egg box, two toy train carriages with 6 windows on each, a shopping receipt showing £12 and a ruler showing 12cm!
Our new number of the week has been chosen as number:
Weekend Challenge: Challenge someone in your family to a number battle! Can you explain what they have to do, just like we do in school? Here are some tricky number battles for you to try…can you find the next two numbers to start off these number battles?
4,5,_,_
9,8,_,_
15,14,_,_
2,4,_,_
10,8, _,_
Now have a go at thinking of your own two numbers to start off a number battle!
Finally, you might be interested to know that every Friday afternoon, it is Reception’s turn to visit our ICT suite in school. The class is divided into three groups (i.e. each child visits once every three weeks) so that we can give the children more individualised support. The children have been working very hard to practise using their mouse skills; moving it around, noticing when the arrow changes into a hand and clicking in the right place on the mouse!
