Blog Week ending 23.09.22
Another successful week of learning in Pear Class!
It was lovely to see many of you at our RWInc meetings in school this week. We hpe that you now have a clearer understanding of how this phonics programme works and as the year goes on there will be further meetings as we move on to the next stages. We appreciate your support in helping your child to consolidate their learning at home and we will continue to send home the formation practise sheets on Fridays. From next week we will begin sending home the sound blending books we discussed in the meeting but if you do have any further questions please do not hesitate to ask.
In RWInc this week our sounds were 'i,n,p and g' and we have started our blending to read the word journey with the help of Fred the Frog. It would really beenfit your child to do lots of Fred talk at home - eg, can you come and s-i-t at the table, it is time for b-e-d. The more the children hear the sounds in familiar words the quicker they will be able to orally blend these sounds into words.
Our maths this week has continued to be about settling in and getting used to the language of number in our classroom. We have been using our book voting station as a way to count how many children have voted for our end of day story, our daily calendar to sequence and order the days of the week and our morning tens frame check in, to count how many children are in school and how many children are away. We have been playing with the children in our maths provision, following their interests and assessing any gaps in understanding. There has been lots of opportunities for counting, ordering, matching and building.
This week in our topic work we have been wondering How have we changed? We enjoyed sharing pictures of how we looked when we were babies and discussing what we were able to do then and how we looked. We learnt some new vocabulary about this, the pictures we were looking at were from the past because it had already happened. We know that the past can be from a very long time ago but even yesterday is the past. We compared our baby pictures to our first day in Reception pictures and we can see that we have changed a lot now that we are school aged children.
Now(the present) that we are in school, we can walk, talk, count and are even starting to read and write! We look very different from when we were babies. In the future we know we will keeping changing and growing. We know this because we learnt from our lifecycle work looking at the Queen that everybody starts off as babies then become children, teenagers, young adults and eventually elderly adults.
We enjoyed reading the story Titch, a story about a boy who is the youngest in his family and as a result he is the smallest with much smaller things than his brothers and sisters. Titch then goes on to plant some seeds that ‘grew and grew and grew!’ We know that during our time in Pear Class we will do lots of growing and changing. We have decided to make a classroom timeline so that we can watch how we grow and the new things that we will learn as we grow during our time in Pear Class.
Our text for Drawing Club this week was the first of our Schools focus texts for our 3C's, The Smartest Giant in Town. The 3C's are what we all strive to be during our time here at Swansfield, caring, courageous and curious. The children enjoyed drawing the giant, adding varying degrees of detail and whilst some children were able to show off their comprehension of the story discussing how the giant had been caring, other children made up their own stories about a giant, with different ideas of why their character was caring. We made some wonderful representations of the giant and enjoyed moving to our different action words!
We were lucky to have a music specialist in with us on Wednesday - she introduced us to her puppet, Elgar the elephant! We did some singing and used the shaking eggs in time with our singing! We also enjoyed another session with our NUF coach - we are getting very good at our catching games and avoiding obstacles as we run!
Later in the week....
Pear class this week have been continuing to think about ‘what makes us special?’ They have been sharing occasions when friends have made them feel special and talking about the qualities of a good friend. There were some brilliant drawing of friends in their books and lovely happy, smiley faces for our ‘friends photos’. We had a lovely circle time, discussing and sharing our experiences with friends. We are all friends in Pear class! It is clear that children are feeling more and more settled into Pear class life as all children offered their opinions and thoughts in circle time.
Our Jigsaw session this week saw the children focus on their emotions as we asked ‘how are you feeling today?’ To consolidate our learning, Pear class went on a nature hunt outside to source some natural materials to make 3D ‘emotion faces’. We were pleased that all children said they felt happy and settled into Pear class but we used the opportunity to discuss and demonstrate other emotions using the resources we had found. Children explored ‘excited’, ‘sad’, ‘nervous’ and ‘worried’. Firstly, they had a go at making these faces in the mirror- we are getting very good at recognizing emotions!
In our PE session this week, we have been moving like monkeys! Swinging from the tall trees in the jungle and moving through the jungle floors on their hands and feet! Children were encouraged to think about the ways in which they moved like animals last week in a fast-paced warm up first. Weekly the children will be building on prior skills taught the session before and so this week the apparatus which they could use became gradually more challenging- higher boxes, more benches and more mats to practice those movement skills!
With harvest time being ever present, Pear class have been enjoying learning some fabulous songs and getting to grips with lots of new harvest terminology. In our Charanga music session this week, we have been listening for the beat and working with partners to perform the song 'pat a cake'. Brilliant dancing to the song 'happy' to end another fabulous week in Pear class.