This week, we read the story of The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister which helped us to think about what it really means to be a good friend. After much discussion, we decided that it is important to think about what other people are feeling and not just to think about ourselves. We also decided that the Rainbow Fish was happy at the end of the story because he made the other fish happy and, when you make others happy, this can actually make you feel happy too!

Mr Quinn reminded us in his assembly this week that, at St. Matthew’s, we always remember to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31).

You can revisit the story of The Rainbow Fish here:

Next, we read the story of Grumpy Duck by Joyce Dunbar. This story also helped us to think about friendships and, in this case, the sort of words we should and should not use when others want to play with us:

At the end of the story, when all the animals play in the rain together, a beautiful rainbow appears overhead. The illustration inspired us to have a go at painting our own rainbows. There was, however, a small problem as Miss Cronin could only find red, yellow and blue paint! Fortunately, we have some expert colour mixers in Reception who were able to explain that we could mix these three colours, which are known as primary colours, in different combinations to create the missing (secondary) colours we needed! We were amazed to discover that if you mix the two primary colours nearest each other on a rainbow, you can create the missing colour in between!

We even tried mixing the colours straight onto the paper which helped us to see the missing colours appearing…

In our phonics lessons, we learnt two new special friends. The first was ‘igh’ which is actually a trigraph or, in other words, a single sound represented by three letters. The sound is pronounced in the same was as the word I, as in I am and you find it in words such as night, light, bright, knight, etc. The saying that goes with this sound is ‘igh, fly high’:

The next sound we learnt is also a special friends sound – this time, another digraph. It is ‘ow’ and is pronounced in the same way that you would say ‘oh’ when surprised. It can be found in words such as blow, slow, snow. Please note, although ‘ow’ can also be pronounced as the sound you might make when hurt in words such as clown, brown and down, we have not learnt this yet. For the time being, we are just focusing on the ‘oh’ version which was very helpful this week when we wanted to write the word ‘rainbow’ in our retelling of the Rainbow Fish story!

Here is the saying for the ‘ow’ sound:

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