The children were introduced to some very important visitors this week; their very own mini-mes!  Mini-mes are miniature versions of the children that they can hold, move around and stand up by themselves. They are a fantastic way of encouraging the development of both communication & language skills and personal, social and emotional skills through imaginative and real-world role-play.

Naturally, they have been a great hit and many have already been taken on adventures around the classroom and out into the playground.  We are chronicling their adventures on a display in the classroom so do take a look next time you visit.  So far, a mini-me has already come face to face to with a large earthworm whilst adventuring through the undergrowth in the nursery playground!  While another needed emergency medical treatment after breaking his arm.  Luckily, he was taken straight to the doctor’s office for emergency treatment including arm bandaging!

In our phonics lessons, we learnt two new sounds.  The first was ‘k’ which makes exactly the same sound and has the same action as ‘c’, which we learnt last week.  To distinguish between the two, we refer to ‘c’ as ‘curly c’ and to ‘k’ as ‘kicking k’.

The second sound we learnt 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’.  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 make a list of them?

The children were also introduced to the idea of tricky words.  These are words that cannot be sounded out as they just don’t make sense when you try to do so.  For example, the tricky word ‘to’ sounds like ‘toh’ if you sound out the sounds ‘t’ and ‘o’and blend them together. So, instead of sounding out, tricky words need to be learnt on-sight as whole words.

Within phase 2 of the letters and sounds programme, there are five tricky words to learn ‘no, go, I, to, the’.

This week, we learnt the tricky words ‘go’, ‘to‘ and ‘I’.  We said ‘hey, you’re a tricky word!  You can’t trick me!’ These tricky words were lurking all around the classroom, so we searched high and low to find them and feed them to Sharky the Shark who thinks tricky words are delicious!  Lots of words can be sounded out and it is really important at this stage that the children understand the difference.  Here are some words that can be sounded out and use all the sounds we have learnt so far.

sat, pat, tap, sap, as

it, is, sit, sat, pit, tip, pip, sip

an, in, nip, pan, pin, tin, tan, nap

am, man, mam, mat, map, Pam, Tim, Sam

dad, and, sad, dim, dip, din, did, Sid

tag, gag, gig, gap, nag, sag, gas, pig, dig

got, on, not, pot, top, dog, pop, God, Mog

can, cot, cop, cap, cat, cod

kid, kit, Kim, Ken

Weekend challenge: How many of these words can you read? Don’t forget to use your robot arms!  Perhaps you could write some too?

In our maths lessons this week we have been practising our counting and reasoning skills. We played a game of beanbag toss alongside a partner and then counted to see how many beanbags we had tossed into our hoop and how many we had tossed outside of our hoop.  We also compared our numbers with our partner’s hoop.  When we are thinking about numbers, we always try to explain how we know our answer to be true.

To support the children’s understanding of how number is represented in both written form and by quantity, we have introduced a ‘number of the week’.  Each week, the child who has been our star of the week will be given the challenge of filling up a number bag with objects/photos/pictures of the number of the week.  This week, our star did a fantastic job of filling up his bag with all sorts of things to do with the number 6 and he presented the contents of his bag to the class.  Well done!

Our new number of the week has been chosen as number…