Welcome back everyone!  The children all seem to have grown noticeably taller during the holiday, if that’s possible in only one week!

For the rest of this term, we will be continuing with our Out and About topic with a particular focus on animals and their life-cycles.

This week, we read an old favourite – the story of the Very Hungry Caterpillar who eats his way through a week’s worth of food and gives himself a very sore tummy.  He then wraps himself up in a cocoon for two weeks before emerging as a beautiful butterfly!

Weekend Challenge: Can you remember the days of the week? Can you say them in the right order?  How many days are there in one week? How many days are there in two weeks? How do you know?

We wondered why the Hungry Caterpillar got such a sore tummy and most of us agreed it was because he ate too much food.  It was also suggested that he got a sore tummy because of the sorts of food he ate.  We thought that eating lots of sugary foods might have given him the sore tummy too.

We decided to sort the foods that he ate into those foods that are ok to eat often (the yellow circle) and those foods that should only be eaten now and again (the red circle).

Weekend Challenge: Can you remember why we decided to put the sausages in the middle, in both circles?  Can you make your own circle chart at home? Find some pictures of different foods to sort or perhaps use real foods! Remember to take a photo to show us or you could post it to our blog!

During our Maths lessons this week we started to think about the idea of taking away.   We sang the song “Five Little Men in a Flying Saucer” but we changed the words a little and started with 10 little men instead of 5, taking one little man away each time until we were left with zero.

Here are our ten little men:

Before we started singing our song, we suddenly realised there was something not quite right about the order of our little men.  Luckily we were able to sort out the problem in no time at all!

That’s better!

Here are the words to the song if you would like to sing it again at home:

There are lots of taking away songs you could sing, for example:

And…

Weekend Challenge: Can you sing a taking away song? Do you know any other taking away songs? Can you make up your own taking away song?

In our phonics lessons this week, we learnt three new sounds.  The first sound we learnt is a new sort of sound known as a trigraph.  It’s a bit like a digraph (where two sounds sit together to make one sound) but in this case three letters sit together to make one sound.

The trigraph we learnt is ‘igh’, as in ‘high’.  Although the word high is made up of 4 letters, it is only made up of 2 sounds, i.e. h-igh.  We decided that the action for ‘igh’ would be holding three fingers up high.

Next we learnt the digraph ‘oa’ as in ‘goat’ and ‘boat’.  This sound is the same as the letter name ‘o’ and the mouth shape looks like this:

We used the jolly phonics action for this sound where you put your hand in front of your mouth as if you are shocked or surprised:

Just before half term, we learnt the digraph ‘ee’ and I had promised the children that I would explain why the action for ‘ee’ was to put their hands up on their heads like donkey ears.  So, we decided to jump ahead on our sound mat a little bit and learn the digraph ‘or’ which, as you can see, goes with the ‘ee’ sound action, as in ‘ee-or’.

Finally, our Star of the Week from before half term did a fantastic job of filling the number of the week bag with things related to the number 10.  Here’s what he brought in to show us:

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