This week we have asked the question – ‘Who helps to keep us healthy?’  We talked about doctors, nurses, dentists, our grown-ups, paramedics, etc and wrote a list.  We made a fabulous role play hospital in the classroom and the children have enjoyed playing in it; dressed in nurses and doctors uniforms and being the patients or receptionists too.  We talked about x-rays and all made an x-ray of a part of our body or a whole skeleton, using paper straws stuck on black paper, just like bones on an x-ray. 

We talked about the importance of brushing our teeth and ordered instructions for doing so.  The children could talk through their instructions using sequential language such as first, next, then and finally.

We also learned about what foods are good for our teeth and which aren’t, such as foods that contain sugar.  We started an experiment to find out what drinks are good or bad for our teeth by putting 4 boiled eggs into 4 liquids (orange juice, water, milk and coca-cola) and left them all week to see what will happen to the shells (which are just like our teeth!).  We will need to leave them over the weekend to check for sure.

We learned about the properties of shape this week, in particular triangles and circles.  We used the language of sides, edges, corner and curved and straight to describe them.  We also then used them to make pictures by drawing around flat shapes and creating pictures just like Kandinsky did in his paintings.

In Forest Learning we looked at work by the artist James Brunt.  He made amazing patterns using natural objects from nature.  In particular we noticed he made a lot of circular patterns which reminded us of the Rangoli patterns we made for Diwali a few weeks ago.  We all worked as a class to collect a variety of objects from the forest to make a giant piece of art work just like James Brunt.

In Monster Phonics this week we learned the sounds j, v and w. 

Please see the video in the Monster Phonics section of our web page to see the actions for these sounds and practise those from the start to w. 

Thank you for sharing the children’s reading books with them at home.  Please read as much as possible (daily would be ideal) even though it is repetition, it is so good for their memory of words, blending sounds and building up their confidence to read fluently.

Have a lovely weekend!