The dressing-up clothes have been a huge hit with the children since the start of the year, and several of them can often be found pretend-playing as knights, kings and queens. So, when it came to deciding what our new role-play area should be, the obvious choice was a medieval castle complete with banquet hall and open fire!  The children have been busy putting their castle together; carefully sponge painting the stone walls, upholstering the thrones with shiny, gold material and sticking material together to create tapestries which are hanging on either side of the roaring fire.  We have just finished painting the drawbridge which we will add next week.  Here’s what our castle looks like so far!

While medieval castles would have had narrow, rectangular shaped windows, our castle is a little bit different.  What do you notice about the shapes of the windows?

We have been thinking about all the different people who would have lived in a castle which is helping us to develop our understanding of community (one of the themes within our current ‘Who am I’? topic).

We have also been busy pulling three new sounds out of the sound bag and learning two new tricky words (‘I’ and ‘the’).  The first sound was ‘ck’ which, as you can see, is actually two letters.  Even though this sound is made up of two letters, it only makes one sound, not two.  We call these types of sounds digraphs or holding hands sounds and we link our thumbs together, as if holding hands, when we see them.

The sound that ‘ck’ makes is exactly the same as the sounds ‘c’ and ‘k’ that we learnt last week.  The action (pretending to play castanets) is also the same.

Weekend challenge: can you read the word duck, using your robot arms?  Can you think of any other ‘ck’ words? Can you write them?

Next, we pulled the sound ‘e’ out of the bag.  We imagined that we were mixing up the ingredients to make a cake and carefully broke an egg into the bowl saying ‘e, e, e’.

It is very easy to muddle up the vowel sounds, especially e and i.  Try to remember e is for e-lephant, while i is for i-gloo.

The final sound of the week was ‘u’.  We have had quite a bit of rain this week, so it was easy to imagine that we would need our umbrellas to keep us dry.