This week, we welcomed some special visitors from Deen City Farm. Farmer Alice and Henrietta the Hen came to tell us about a very special job they have entrusted us with. They left us with 10 chick eggs, an incubator, a brood hutch and some chick feed. It is our job to keep the eggs safe and warm in the incubator for 21 days and, fingers crossed, look after our baby chicks for about a week once they hatch. The children are taking their new job very seriously and have been busy writing signs to let everyone know not to touch the eggs or the incubator.
Over the coming weeks we are going to take some time to revise the digraphs and trigraphs we learnt last term. We want to make sure the children feel really confident when it comes to recognising these sounds and applying their knowledge in both their reading and writing before they move on to Year 1.
This week, we revised the digraphs ch, sh, th and ng. We also had a look at the ‘ing’ ending in words like ‘running’ and ‘sleeping’. We talked about what we had been doing during mix-up time and we noticed that the sound ‘i’ always comes before the ‘ng’ digraph at the end of these words.
NB: please note in the above photo – lying was as in ‘lying down’ when playing an imaginary game, not telling a lie!
Weekend Challenge: can you talk about and/or write about what you like to do during mix-up? Perhaps you could write a sentence using the ‘ing’ ending in your writing (e.g. I like playing with the lego during mix up). Are there lots of things you like to do? Can you write more than one sentence?
In our maths lessons this week, we had a think about another way of counting and recording numbers. We had a go at using a tally chart to count, record and then interpret how many different farm animals were in our farmyard bag. The children were very keen to have a go and many of them quickly got the hang of how to record numbers in this way. Can you remember which animal we found most often in the farmyard bag? Which animals did we find least often?
Weekend Challenge: have a go at making a tally chart of your own; perhaps you could survey your family and friends and find out which farm animal or pet they prefer? Which animal is the most popular? Which animal is the least popular? Don’t forget there is a special way to tally the number 5 and the numbers after 5 all start with a tally of 5 first.
Or: can you write down the tally for the number of children in our class? (i.e. 27)
Our number of the week was 14 and our Star of the Week did a fantastic job of filling up his number bag with 14 dinosaurs, photos and drawings of the number 14. He had even made the number 14 out of berries! Wow!
One of our Stars of the Week from before the holidays also brought in her number bag for the number 11. She also did a great job of filling up the bag. Amongst other things, she had filled her bag with a sheet of 11 stickers, a bag with 11 mini-eggs and a heart decorated with 11 stripes. Such fantastic number work!
Finally, we focused on two books this week which are slightly different versions of the same story. This was a great opportunity for us to compare the stories, talk about the differences between them and talk about which one we preferred, and why? We all decided that we preferred the story of ‘Chicken Licken’ “because the animals run away” and “because the animals don’t get eaten”!
