We dove head first into our topic work this week as we read several pirate stories, both fiction and non-fiction.  We have been busy making pirate hats, painting treasure and sailing the high seas with treasure maps!

We also read a lovely story about a lonely lion who finds living on a desert island a little too quiet for his liking.  He decides to send out a message in a bottle to find some friends and soon enough his island begins to fill up with visitors.

We also found a message in a bottle that had been left in our own water tray!  We carefully opened it up and discovered it was a message from Blue Fish, thanking the Rainbow Fish for sharing his scales. We were quite inspired by the idea of writing a message in a bottle and have been busy writing many of our own.  One of us (below) was delighted to receive a message in a bottle from a friend!

We also found time to revise the trigraph ‘igh’ and the digraph ‘oa’.  The children are really becoming such phonics experts; quickly and accurately identifying which sound is in which word (e.g. lightning, boat, knight, moat, goat, floating).

Weekend challenge: have a go at playing buried treasure: select phase 3, then set 1-7 plus ‘igh’ or ‘oa’.  Remember to put the real words in the treasure chest and the pretend words in the rubbish bin.  You could even make your own buried treasure game: here are some printables to get you started!

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/PrintablesBuriedTreasure.html

Our number of the week was number 6 and our star of the week did a super job of filling up his number bag with all sorts of things related to the number 6. Well done!

Our new number of the week has been chosen as number:

This week we also spent some time trying to find numbers on a blank hundred square. The children were given a number and had to explain how they might find out where it is hiding (e.g. can you find the number 11? can you explain why you think it it there?).  We use something called Number Splat which the children find quite appealing thanks to the splat sound you can hear when you touch different numbers!

Weekend challenge: using number splat, can you find the numbers 5, 18, 26, 44 and 78? Can you explain how you found them?