We have made it to the end of the week!
We have had lots of poorly children this week, the sicky bug is definitely doing the rounds! Please could we ask that you make sure to keep your child off 48 hours AFTER they have been sick. Your child may seem better, but they will still be infectious so in the interest of keeping the rest of or classroom safe, we would appreciate if you could follow this school policy.
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. We have also started to look at numbers 4 and 5. The children are developing their skills at subitising(knowing a number without having to count) amounts up to 5 of both regular and irregular arrangements and mark making these numbers.
Our rhyme for number 4 is 'down and across and down some more, that's the way we make a 4!'
Our rhyme for number 5 is 'down and around with a flag on high, that's the way we make a 5!'
Our afternoons this week have focused on 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. 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 and decorating mendhi hand patterns as well as reading non-fiction books that told us all about the traditions and customs involved in this festival.
We had so much fun dancing the ‘hokey cokey’ in PE this week. 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 then put our thinking stills to the test and came up with some great new dances in our groups; creating our own version of the hokey cokey according to a dance feeling and style. There were some very creative dances- well done!
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 Pear 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 then sang ‘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 created our own fantastic shepherd pictures and heard some sounds in some words to describe them. We then wrote down these words/sounds before sharing our learning with our friends. Some of our Pear class friends made some brilliant woolly sheep.
We have been thinking about our houses and homes this week and telling our friends why we think our home is a special place for us. We wanted the teddies in our class to have a home too and so we made them a home using junk modelling and construction materials. We looked at different houses from around the world and decided that houses come in many shapes and sizes! We drew a picture of our own home and added it to our Pear class learning floorbook- a special book we enjoy to reflect on our learning as the weeks go by.
Have a lovely weekend,
The Pear class team