Loneliness & Words of Kindness

What a lot of wonderfully frosty mornings we have had this week! There has been much talk of helping parents to scrape ice off car windscreens and of the excitement of scooting through crunchy grass before school. It seemed quite fitting then that our first Spotlight Story was Stickman by Julia Donaldson which you can revisit here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhfLzw9Gf6Q

On Monday morning, our school field looked almost as snowy as the front cover of the story, as it was covered in a white layer of frost! Of course, we simply had to head out onto the field to investigate and, while we were there, we kept our eyes open for Stick Man and his family.

Photos of our expedition onto the frosty field to follow…

While on the field, we found lots and lots of Stick People of all different shapes and sizes! We decided to rescue them from the field and brought them back to the classroom where we used googly eyes and fabrics to really bring them to life.

We also enjoyed selecting sticks to represent Stick Man, his lady-love and his three children. We used lots of comparative language such as ‘biggest’, ‘smallest’, ‘bigger than’ and ‘smaller than’ as we ordered the sticks by size. Then we had a go at choosing some sticks to represent the people in our families!

In the story of Stick Man, we discovered our word of the week: lonely. We decided that this means “feeling sad because you are alone”. In the story, Stick Man is lonely because he is lost and he feels much better when it makes it home to the family tree.

In our next Spotlight Story, ‘On Sudden Hill’ by Linda Sarah & Benji Davies, we learned about a different type of loneliness. This time, we learned that you might feel lonely if your friend starts to play with another friend. You might feel alone because you are left out. And you might feel angry because you are jealous. We really loved this story, especially when we discovered that a two-by-two rhythm can become a three-by-three rhythm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESsRgNVRw68

Our final Spotlight Story was Beegu by Alexis Deacon. Beegu was lonely because she was lost, just like Stick Man, but also because she felt different and no one seemed to want to be her friend until she came across some “small ones”.

We also watched and really enjoyed this BBC video about what can make you feel lonely and what you can do if you feel like this.

Our Picture News focus this week encouraged us to think about whether the festive period is a happy time for everyone. We compared two very different pictures of a Christmas dinner to help us understand that, for some people, Christmas can be a lonely time.

images from google.co.uk and theguardian.com

Next, we looked at a drawing by an illustrator called Lucy Burvant. The drawing is called ‘Christmas Kindness’ and she drew it to encourage people to think about the words of kindness we can all use at Christmas time to help people who might be feeling lonely.

When looking at the picture, we thought “both of them are lonely”, “the little girl is trying to make him feel better” and “she looks like a fairy or an angel”. We also talked about the words of kindness that the little girl might be saying to the creature on top of the lamppost and, of course, we came up with some lovely ideas: “I will help you to feel better”, “come down and have this candy cane” and “come down, you can have this treat”. Well done Reception, you are all so kind and friendly.

In our R.E. lessons, we have been learning about how Christians prepare for Christmas during Advent. We have been finding out what each candle on an Advent wreath represents (hope, peace, joy and love) and sharing our excitement at opening the first few doors on our own Advent calendars.

We also read a story about the smallest fir tree in the forest who felt very lonely because all the other trees had been taken into the town to be decorated as proper Christmas trees. The small fir tree had not yet grown tall enough to go into town. Luckily, some of the animals in the forest found him and made sure he was not lonely on Christmas day. This was a really delightful story and possibly published a while ago as I can’t seem to find any record of it online! I will keep looking and update this page if I have any luck, as it was one of the loveliest Christmas stories I have come across in a while.

Just after we had finished reading the story, the children noticed a small tree had appeared in our classroom! We decided it was big enough to be decorated and quickly set to work, with every child putting a decoration on the tree or helping to string up the lights. Mrs Mooney came up with an ingenious way of putting the lights on the tree: she asked 4 children to spread out in a line, holding the string off lights (see below) and then they followed her around the tree several times until the string had been strung!

In our Computing lesson this week, we had a go at decorating Christmas trees using our fantastic mouse-skills to select and move decorations onto a tree. You can have a go at home too by clicking here.

In phonics this week, we learnt three new sounds: v, y and w. When saying v and w, be careful not to say ‘vuh’ and ‘wuh’.