Another week done and dusted, the weeks are flying by in Plum class! There have been a few children off with bugs this week (which is quite common at this time of year), please remember to keep your child off for 48 hours after they have been sick! This is really important to prevent the spread of germs.
In RWI we continue to be very busy in our groups recapping set one sounds, practising speedy blending (reading) and being super writers. If your child is in Mrs Johnson's RWI ditty group, they have been working really hard to remember the tricky words "I" and "the". We continue to work on supporting the children with accurate letter formation and pencil grip. Please keep practising at home too.
In our mathematical learning this week we have enjoyed learning and using positional language: in, on, under, over, behind, next to, through, in between. To help our understanding we enjoyed building obstacle courses for our friends. We then gave instructions to help them complete it. For example, go through the tunnel, bounce on the trampoline and go around the chair.
Our afternoons this week have been learning all about the festival of light: Diwali. The children enjoyed learning about the story of Rama and Sita and worked hard to order and sequence story maps as they retold the story to us. We worked hard to sculpt and decorate our own classroom Diva lamps and developed our understanding of our key vocabulary: festival, Diwali, Hinduism, belief, light and dark. The children were able to make links with the celebration we had learnt about a couple of weeks ago (bonfire night) and how fireworks were used for both to light up the sky! We enjoyed listening to Hindu music, creating rangoli patterns with chalk and rice and had fun decorating mendhi hand patterns as well as reading non-fiction books that told us all about the traditions and customs involved in this festival.
Later in the week, we had so much fun dancing the ‘hokey cokey’ in PE. We all loved this upbeat dance and had lots of laughs changing the style of the dance by making it ‘silly’ and then winding down a bit and making it into a ‘tired’ dance. We looked at our dance feelings posters and talked about these emotions as we went through the lesson. We thought about whether or not the speed of the dance changed according to the feelings expressed. We decided that a silly emotion can speed up the dance and that a tired emotion definitely slows the dance down.
We really enjoyed listening to ‘Ganesh is Fresh by MC Yogi’ in our Charanga music session. We found out that the song had ‘speaking words’ in it and that it was called a ‘rap’. We found the pulse of the song and created some brilliant dance moves too! We are learning the ‘Not too difficult’ song and are enjoying joining in with the actions. In addition to our weekly music sessions, we are learning lots of new songs to share with you at the Christmas performance- we are ever so musical at the moment!
Speaking of the Nativity, we have been busy in Plum class learning about the Christmas story and thinking about the special people in it. This week we focussed on the shepherds and listened to an excerpt from the bible about shepherds hearing that Jesus was the good news! We listened to the song ‘Whilst shepherds watched their flocks by night’. We talked about the job that shepherds do and how they might have felt when the angel appeared to them. We discussed why we thought Christians believe this was such good news about baby Jesus being born. We then created our own fantastic shepherd pictures and had a go at labelling them.
Next week is another busy one so have a lovely restful weekend.