Blog Week ending 08/10/21
Another busy and exciting week in Pear Class!
Before we get started with the blog, a couple of reminders..
- Please can we ask that you do not use the staff car park to get to Pear Class entrance. It is a safety risk and should only be used by staff. There have been incidents in the wider community of cars rolling backwards due to technical failures and we would like to keep our children safe.
- I have noticed more children arriving at school with juice. As per our healthy eating policy we only allow water at school – all children in Pear Class happily drink water at lunch time so we would politely request that all children arrive with water in the mornings from Monday.
Thank you!
In RWI we have spent lots of time blending this week. Blending is when you say each sound (in a short word) and push the sounds together to read the word. We have been working on our first set of sounds only to do this: (m,a,s,d,t,i,p,n,g) . We were also introduced to our special friend Fred the Frog. Fred can only press the sound buttons and say the sound but he is unable to blend the sounds into a word so we enjoyed helping him with this! It would be really helpful if you could carry on practising initial sound recognition at home with games like ‘I spy’ because the majority of our children are not ready for blending as they are still not hearing those initial sounds. I also spend a lot of time in Pear Class talking in robot talk -the more the children hear sounds being blended sequentially the faster it becomes a natural process to them. So when it is time for b.e.d, ask your child to come and s.i.t. and brush their teeth! Can they put their shoes on the m.a.t?
In our mathematical work we have been comparing amounts. We played a game with a partner where we had to choose a number between one and five and represent that number using pine cones. We then had to decide whose plate had the more than the other on and whose plate had less than the other. We were then challenged to add or take away pine cones to make sure that we both had an equal amount as each other. Lots of children can easily see and explain more than but less than is more tricky and although children can see when they have the same amount they find using equal in their explanations tricky. Try working on this over the weekend using a pile of Autumn leaves on your walk – can you make piles of leaves and ask them to make a pile that is equal to yours?
This week we have moved on from thinking about seed dispersal to thinking about some of the produce grown from seeds. We enjoyed reading the story The Little Red Hen, a lovely story about a hen who grows, cuts and grinds wheat to make flour that she then uses to make bread. The children enjoyed learning about the changes to the wheat plant and were shocked when they investigated how different wheat and flour looked!
We engaged in some sustained thinking about the morality of the story because the little red hen found that none of the other animals would help her in the process of making her bread, yet they all wanted to eat it. We likened it to playing in our classroom and talked about how we all get to play with the toys so we should all help to tidy them up! There were some lovely responses to the question ‘why would you help the little red hen?’ it is clear that we have a very thoughtful class this year.
Excitingly, Mrs Vicky brought in some bread that she had baked for us to try and we also were able to make our own bread. We learnt all about how our key vocabulary: grain, wheat and we also learnt how to help the bread to prove and make it become bigger and tastier!
As part of this topic we also created story maps, worked in a playdough bread shop, decorated feathered hens, wrote letters to the animals and enjoyed retelling the story with our friends.
To end the week we celebrated National Poetry Day. We enjoyed reading the rhyming poem Cat in the Hat and worked hard to identify the rhyming words within this poem as well as joining in with the repeated refrains. Many of us produced our own cats with hats using playdough!
We hope that you have a lovely weekend and we look forward to next week where we will be learning all about the food that we eat and how it is harvested. Look out for a special performance on the blog next week!
Mrs H-S