Our Spotlight Story this week was Jack and the Beanstalk and we particularly enjoyed this lift-the-flap version by Nick Sharratt which you can revisit here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlpzbFS8WvQ

After we had read the story, we noticed some rather strange happenings in the classroom…first, a beanstalk appeared in our quiet room and started to grow up the wall!   Mr Norris came to have a look as, by mid-week, it had grown through the ceiling and he thought he’d better get up on the roof to see if it had gone right through and up into the clouds!

The next day, a parcel was delivered to the school office addressed to Reception class.  We opened it up to discover a letter and a package of beans!  This is what the letter said:

We decided that this letter could only have come from the friendly giant (not from the one who doesn’t like children) and we quickly set to work planting our beans.  We learnt that beans need water and sunlight to grow into beanstalks, so we put our beans on the windowsill and made sure they had enough water.  We didn’t use any soil yet, as we wanted to be able to get a really good view of the beans as the shoots and roots start to appear.  We can’t wait to see how tall our beanstalks will become!

We also watched a time-lapse video of a bean growing into a beanstalk and we were fascinated to discover that roots are just like straws that the plant uses to drink water from the soil!

This week was also an important week because we started our phonics lessons!

We learnt the sounds that the letters m, a and s make.  We will be learning three new sounds each week so please do make sure you practise these at home with your child.  Whenever we learn a new sound, we start with a picture prompt, in other words, something that starts with the sound and helps us to put the sound into context.

We tell the children that the sound is ‘hidden’ behind the picture and turn the card over to reveal the sound itself:

If you are unsure how to say the say sounds – please do rewatch this video:

Or you might find these mouth shape pictures helpful:

To help your child practise the sounds, you could play a simple game of memory: use 12 pieces of paper and write the letters on each so you have 4 cards with m on them, 4 with a on them and 4 with s on them.  Place them face down on a table and muddle them up.  Take turns to turn over two cards at a time.  What are the sounds?  Are they the same? Keep them if they are the same, turn them back over if not.  Carry on until all the cards have been picked up.  The winner is the one with the most cards.

Or you could play a sound hunt game – how many things can you find in the house that start with m…or a…or s.  If you are in the car, remember ‘I spy’ is always a brilliant way to practice hearing and distinguishing initial sounds in words.

If you have bath crayons, try writing these on the tiles at bath-time and give your child a spray bottle to spray the sounds as they say them.  This is also fun in a driveway or on the pavement with chalks.

If your child is already recognising these sounds confidently, they can have a go at writing them correctly.  We teach the children sayings to help them learn the correct letter formation.  For example, for the letter m, we say ‘Maisie, mountain, mountain’.

This video explains this a little better:

Finally, in our maths lessons this week, we have been practising our subitising skills.  This means when you are able to look at a group of objects and say how many there are without counting them.  When numbers are small, like 1, 2, 3, it is fairly easy to do this. Apparently, 3 year olds are able to subitise up to three objects while 4 years can subitise up to 4.  This correlation does not continue beyond 4 however!  We used a 1-3 die to play this beanstalk game and it was lots of fun! The children rolled the die, looked at the dots, but reminded themselves that they ‘do not (need to) count!’ and then put the correct number of beans into their pots.  Some of the children were even able to scoop up the correct number of beans without re-counting them.  The winner was the person with the most beans at the end of the game.

We hope everyone is having a lovely weekend – see you on Monday!