Blog week ending 7th May
Another fab week in Pear class!
This week in our RWI work we had a celebration ceremony for our set 2 sounds. We were all very excited to see Sally back in the classroom delivering our certificates. Many of us have been doing paired reading and our story this week has been 'On The Bus'. We are all working hard to use our sounds in our reading and it is really encouraging to see how many red words the children can recognise, clearly lots of work is being done at home so thank you for that.
In our maths work we have been continuing our work on subtraction and the children have been recording their number stories independently. We used numicon and played a game where we had to roll the dice and 'take away' the number that was shown. Children carefully crossed out the holes to create this amount and then were able to see that the remaining amount was their answer. Some children were able to record this easily without any encouragement and we extended their learning by asking them to tell their subtraction story. First there was a number 9 numicon, then I rolled the dice and take away four, now the number equals 5.' You may wish to build and extend on this learning at home using teen numbers. Numicon is a good visual basis for taking away, but there are lots of things to use - we enjoyed creating evil peas out of playdoh that we squashed as we subtracted, so that we could easily count the answer from the remaining unsquashed peas! If you have any chalk at home the children are enjoying creating their own number stories outside - they particularly enjoy being the teacher and explaining the process to you!
Our topic has once again been very exciting... we have been enjoying reading the story Supertato, a superhero tale about a cheeky evil pea and a super potato who comes to save the day! We were shocked to find that the evil pea had been in our classroom and created chaos and trapped some of our super veggies! We decided to make our own supertatoes to free them and created captions of what these veggies might have been shouting to us. We considered how we would feel if we were trapped and how we would want to be helped and freed. We were most impressed with how much the children are hearing their special friend sounds and using them in their writing.
Alongside this, we also enjoyed creating WANTED posters that we can attach in the classroom and around Alnwick to trap the evil pea. It has been lovely to receive emails from parents explaining how engaged your children are with this topic- lots of our reluctant writers were itching to visit the writing table. As I have mentioned before, Pear class love a bad guy! There has been lots of pea crushing, threading and trap making going on as we work out how we will trap such a small villain!
In our shape, space and measure work we have been drawing our own super veggies and comparing the sizes of them. We find it very easy to say the carrot is tall and the potato is short but this week we worked on talking using comparative sentences. eg' The broccoli is taller than the short potato. The potato is bigger than the beetroot but the pea is the smallest of them all.'
At the beginning of reception the children created self portraits to demonstrate to us their pencil grip, their name writing and how well they can draw basic body shapes but also to help them to learn who they are and develop their sense of self. This week we have completed our third instalment of these for our 'Wow wall'. This is a brilliant way for us, but more importantly, the children, to see their progression from the beginning of reception to the end of reception. Their final instalment will be drawn on the last week of the summer term and will then be sent home for you to see. It shows you a tiny snippet of the journey that they have been on with us here in reception and they were so proud to see how much their skills in these areas had developed.
A mixed week weather wise has meant we have not had as much outdoor learning as we would like so fingers crossed next week is better so that we can begin to enjoy our new topic exploring Minibeasts.
We hope that you have a lovely weekend,
Mrs H-S
Super veggie madness!