Welcome back to a new term at school and we hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas break.  The children have returned full of enthusiasm and news of their holidays and we have very much enjoyed catching up with them all.  They all look a little bit taller too!

This term, our spotlight stories will be inspired by the topic ‘Once Upon A Time’. We will be immersing ourselves in the wonderfully imaginative world of traditional tales and what better place to start than deep in the forest in the home of the three bears. Here is the classic story (from Parragon Books) which you might like to revisit with your child – you could turn the sound off and read it yourself – don’t forget to do different voices for the different bears or ask your child to join in and help you if you prefer!

Next, we read a different version of the story called ‘Goldilocks, Eat Your Greens’ by Steve Smallman which we loved! We talked about what the phrase ‘different version’ might mean and we used words like different and similar. You can revisit the story here – as before, why not turn the sound off and read it yourself.

This story helped us to think about healthy foods and we talked about the sort of foods we eat for breakfast everyday. We all agreed that while coco pops and pain au chocolat are yummy, we must try not to eat sugary foods everyday and save them instead for a treat now and again.

In our R.E. lessons this term, we will be learning about our wonderful world and what Christians believe happened in the beginning. To help us understand more about the word ‘beginning’, we then talked about what happens at the start of our day, for example, eating healthy foods for breakfast, getting dressed, brushing our teeth, walking to school and giving our grown-ups a big hug before waving goodbye for the day.

We also listened to a version of Goldilocks on BBC radio. Because this version was on the radio, without pictures, we had to use our extra special listening ears! You can listen to the story again at home if you like by following this link:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/school-radio/eyfs-listen-and-play-the-house-of-the-bears/zfj8gwx

We have now learnt all of the single sounds and this week, we learnt the sound sh (as in ship, sheep, fish, etc.) which is the first of several digraphs we will be learning. A digraph is a single sound (or phoneme) that is represented by two letters (or graphemes). In the Read, Write, Inc Phonics program that we use here at St. Matthew’s, we call digraphs ‘special friends’. When learning ‘special friends’, the picture prompt includes a saying to help the children remember the letters that make up the digraph:

Here is a reminder of all of the handwriting sayings we have learnt to date:

Have a lovely weekend everyone and stay warm!