This week, we said goodbye to the Billabongs of Australia and headed east across the vast Pacific Ocean until we reached the shores of South America. We were looking for a lot of trees (as this is the next landscape in the ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt story) and what better place to find them than on the continent that contains the largest forest in the world; the Amazon Rainforest!
The little orange man guided us into land safely, deep in the rainforest amongst the trees and streams…
As we started to look around, Stanley (our three-toed sloth) suddenly became very excited! Apparently Stanley actually comes from the Amazon Rainforest and he recognised the place where we landed!
After this discovery, our first spotlight story simply had to be “Slowly, Slowly, Slowly”, said the Sloth by Eric Carle which you can revisit below. All of the animals in the book live in the Amazon Rainforest – can you remember the names of any of the animals? Don’t forget to pause the video on the last page so you can have a good look at all the beautiful animals alongside their names.
Our next spotlight story was about one of the other animals that lives in the rainforest – in fact, there are nine different types of this animal living there. We decided to be animal detectives and played a game of Guess Who to find out which animal this might be. Using the final page from the Eric Carle book, I gave the children 4 clues:
*I have 4 legs. Lots of animals have 4 legs. Which one could it be? Do you need another clue?
*I have a long tail. This helps a bit, but it could be a crocodile or a monkey or one of the large cats…
*I have brown fur. Wait, it’s not the crocodile then!
*I live up in the trees. It must be one of the monkeys!
That’s right! I am a monkey!
Our next spotlight story was ‘Night Monkey, Day Monkey’ by Julia Donaldson and Lucy Richards. This delightful story introduces children to some of the differences between night and day as well as the idea of nocturnal animals. These ideas are presented through night monkey, and then day monkey’s, misconceptions which can be a little tricky to understand so please do revisit this story at home if you get the chance:
In our phonics lessons, we learnt another special friends sound: qu as in queen, quilt, quick and question. The sound is a bit like saying q and w together (i.e. qw) but it is written as qu.
Here is the picture prompt for this sound:
We also learnt another red word, the. As you may remember from last week, there are some words that you cannot Fred-talk and must just be learnt on sight instead.
In our maths lessons, we have been developing our understanding of numbers being composed of other numbers. We used the sentence ‘5 is made of something and something”…to talk about the different combinations of numbers that make up 5:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzqrkCAR40c
Finally, our babies have been enjoying lots of lovely bathtime this week – getting a good scrub and shampoo! We will be continuing to talk about our baby photos next week.
We hope everyone is having a lovely weekend, see you on Monday!