We have loved looking after our visitor, Space Teddy, this week; making adaptations to his spacesuit and adding extra rocket boosters to his spaceship to make sure he gets back home to the Planet Zog safely.
Even though Space Teddy speaks in a different language, we know that you don’t have to speak the same language as someone to be friends with them and that there are always lots of other ways to communicate! Giving someone a lovely smile is certainly a good start!
Our Spotlight Story this week was ‘Night Monkey, Day Monkey’ which you can revisit in this YouTube video. Night Monkey and Day Monkey sees things quite differently but, luckily, they do speak the same language so they are able to use their words to help each other understand their different worlds.
This story led to some very interesting conversations about night and day; we learnt that the earth is turning as it travels around the sun and that it is daytime for half of the earth when it is facing the sun, while it is nighttime for the other half which is facing away from the sun. That’s why it’s nighttime in Australia when it’s daytime in Raynes Park!
We are starting to discover that another way to communicate and to get your message across is to write something down. This is exactly what Space Teddy decided to do! He wrote his message down on a piece of paper and, would you believe it, the language he actually speaks is subitising fingers! In Reception we are, of course, fluent in this language so we quickly worked out that Space Teddy’s message was 4, 2, 3, 3, 1.
This seemed like some sort of code which we would need to crack, so we searched on Google for a codebreaker and look what we found!
We used the codebreaker to help us work out that the word in Space Teddy’s message was…
As it turns out, Space Teddy wanted to taste the most delicious food on Planet Earth which is, of course, jelly! So, we quickly set to work, washing our hands, cutting up the jelly cubes, adding hot water and then cold water, mixing carefully with a spoon, pouring it into jelly moulds and, finally, popping it in the fridge.
We watched very carefully to see what happened when the hot water was added to the jelly cubes. I was so impressed by the language the children used, the explanations they gave for what was happening and the links they made between their previous experiences and this one (e.g. it’s like what happens with a bath bomb).
Although we absolutely loved making the jelly, it was even better to eat it! And Space Teddy joined in too, eating his jelly through a straw, so he didn’t have to take off his spacesuit helmet.
Would you believe it, but one of our sounds this week was indeed j…for jelly! What are the chances 😉 Here are the three sounds that we learnt:
When learning ‘h’, we made sure we were not saying ‘huh’ and we put our hand in front of our mouth to feel the air as we said this sound. When writing, be sure to come all the way down the horse’s long neck, otherwise you may end up writing ‘n’.
The ‘r’ sound comes through our mouths (and not from our throats, i.e. it is not a roar) and you will feel your tongue curling near the roof of your mouth.
The final sound, ‘j’ often gets confused with ‘i’. You might like to have a look at these sounds side by side. We used the writing repeater to do this and noticed that ‘j’ has a long tail while ‘i’ is much shorter.
Here are the mouth shapes for these sounds:
from https://www.slideshare.net/msg719/abc-pronunciary
We have also been busy using our ‘Fred-talk’ to practise reading lots of CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words. We used the word machine to generate words for us which we then read and had a go at writing. Why not have a go at doing this at home – you could try and make the different words using the sounds in your sound & word pot. If you do not have this yet, please be sure to send in your book bag next week so we can send yours home.
Have a lovely weekend everyone, keep warm and see you on Monday!