A very happy new year to everyone and a very warm welcome back to a new term at school.  The children have returned full of smiles, enthusiasm and news of their Christmas holidays and we have very much enjoyed catching up with them all.  They all look a little bit taller too! This term, our topic will be ‘Out of the Egg’ and our learning will be inspired by reading lots of stories about creatures that come out of eggs.

This week, we read a firm favourite; the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, which you can revisit here:

We also spent some time thinking about why the Very Hungry Caterpillar had such an awful stomachache.  We decided it was because he had eaten too much.  But we also wondered if he may have eaten the wrong sorts of foods.  We all agreed that if you eat lots and lots of unhealthy food, like sweets and cakes, it is not good for you and can make you poorly.  The children told me that you can eat sweets but only “sometimes” and “you need to put them away for later”.  We played a sorting game where we fed the Very Hungry Caterpillar the healthy foods and put the unhealthy foods in the sweet box.

We are also working on a Very Hungry Caterpillar display which is coming along nicely…and we explored colour mixing of yellow and blue paint to create the green for the caterpillar’s body:

Outside, we were delighted to discover that, over the holidays, some new playground markings had been painted in our garden!  You can see our new number rocket and our alphabet caterpillar in the background below.  We also have a fantastic new track for our bikes!  Our car tyres had been moved around, to make way for the new markings and, while moving them back, we were amazed to discover long pieces of ice had formed inside them!

Mrs Warner invited us into the big hall for an Assembly today and we learnt about the visit of the three wise men to baby Jesus in the stable.  She told us about a mean and nasty person called King Herod and explained that Mary & Joseph took baby Jesus to a country called Egypt to keep him safe from Herod.

Finally, we learnt two new sounds in our phonics lessons this week.  These sounds are different to the sounds we have learnt so far as they are digraphs or, as we call them, ‘special friends’.  Sometimes, two letters sit together to make one sound.  This is known as a digraph.

The special friends we learnt are ‘sh’ and ‘th’.

You might like to rewatch this video to check how we say these sounds:

Have a lovely weekend everyone!