It has been a particularly exciting week with the arrival of our baby chicks, along with the kidnapping (by pirates) and daring rescue (by us) of the Singing Mermaid!

On Tuesday morning, the chick eggs finally started to hatch and by the end of the day, six wet and exhausted babies had pecked their way out into the world.

We named the chicks: Superchick, Chicky, Sweet, Rose, Annabel and Daisy.  The names were decided with a democratic vote.  Each child chose their preferred name from a large list of suggestions and wrote it on a post-it note.  We could then clearly see which names had the most votes.

The six chicks are all doing well and have been busy eating, drinking, pecking, cheeping, napping and growing.  At some point next week, they will be returning to Deen City Farm. If you have not already done so, please feel free to pop in and meet them with your child, after school one day next week, before they leave us.

On Tuesday, we also read the story of the Singing Mermaid who is tricked into leaving her home by the seashore to become a circus performer.  In the end, along with the help of her friends, she comes up with a clever plan to escape and find her way home.

The Singing Mermaid came to visit us in class and showed us how she managed to get back to the sea from the circus.  Can you remember what she did? Remember, she doesn’t have any legs, only a tail…

On Wednesday morning, we made a rather startling discovery in the water tray.  A message in a bottle had been left there overnight and it read:

The poor Singing Mermaid had been kidnapped once again.  Oh dear!  The children wasted no time in coming up with a plan to get the Singing Mermaid back and after much discussion we decided to write back to the pirates offering them 57 pieces of treasure in exchange for the safe return of the Singing Mermaid.  We popped our message back in the bottle and left it in the water tray after school.

The following day, the message had gone and a new message had appeared:

Those cheeky pirates!  Luckily, Reception are such good treasure hunters that they weren’t in the least fazed by the thought of having to find 100 pieces of treasure.  Working in ten teams of three children, each team searched the playground for 10 pieces of treasure.

Back in the classroom, we used a hundred square to carefully lay out the treasure in rows of 10.  Can you remember how many rows of 10 we needed to make 100?

We carefully poured the 100 pieces of treasure into a treasure box and wrote several messages back to the pirates letting them know we were ready for the exchange.

On Friday, another message appeared along with a treasure map!  This time, the message read: to Reception, bring the treasure, follow the map, from the pirates.

Without thinking twice, we grabbed our treasure box, the map and the Singing Mermaid’s empty shell and set off on our daring rescue mission.

In no time at all, we could see the pirate ship in the distance (in the KS2 playground!).  We snuck up on the ship, without a sound, so as not to alert the pirates to our presence.  Once there, two very brave children searched the lower deck, while another two climbed the ladder to the top.  As we all held our breath, the Singing Mermaid was found, on the top deck, cowering in a corner.

We quickly placed the treasure box in the spot where we had found her and raced back to the safety of our classroom. Phew! What a relief it was to have the Singing Mermaid back safe and sound!

In other news…

The children continue to be very inspired by our topic this term, building their own pirate ships outside, playing in the new pirate ship role-play area, drawing treasure maps and writing messages in bottles!

Our Star of the Week did yet another fantastic job of filling up his number bag with all things related to the number 19.

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

Weekend Challenge: can you make your own number bag for the number 20, or perhaps choose a bigger number!!