It is hard to believe that Christmas is just around the corner but the amount of glitter on the classroom floor is certainly a tell-tale sign!  This week, the children had a great time at their Christmas party; playing traditional party games and enjoying their party tea. A huge thank you to all the parents and carers for their food contributions and offers of help. Photos to follow…

Back in the classroom, we have been getting ready for the end of term, finishing off our Christmas cards and other Christmas creations ready to bring home on the last day of term next week (hence the amount of glitter on the classroom floor!).  We have been thinking about the true meaning of Christmas during assemblies with Mrs Warner and Mr Quinn and we have been reading the Christmas story during our carpet times. These lovely versions of the nativity story can both be found in our local Raynes Park library if you would like to share them again at home:

In our phonics lessons, we have been busy practising blending sounds together to make words.  The children are now very good at identifying individual sounds, but many of them find it difficult to blend the sounds together in the right order.  A particularly fun way to practise blending is through the game ‘buried treasure’ which we played on our interactive whiteboard in class.  This game also asks the children to decide whether the word they have read is a real word or a made-up word.  This is quite a challenge for the children but a very good skill to start developing as they will do lots of more of this in Year 1.

If you would like to have a go at playing this game at home, you can find it here along with several other games that support the learning of phase 2 phonics.

We would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Christmas holiday full of hope, peace, joy and love!