This week we continued our learning about Africa by finding out all about which animals live in Africa.  We learned about the way they camouflage themselves to hide from predators and enjoyed making our own pictures of the different animals’ fur and skin close up, using paint.  We learned about the animals that are hunted and what they are hunted for, such as elephants for their ivory tusks and leopards for their fur.  We decided that hunting wasn’t good and that it meant the animals were endangered, meaning there weren’t that many left and so could become extinct.

How do animals hide themselves from predators? Who do you think these animal skins belong to?

We enjoyed listening to African music and watching videos of African people dancing.  The music reminded us a lot of jungles and had drums and pipes and bells.  It was very lively.  We made our own dance movements to this music too!

We continued our story ‘Handa’s Surprise’ this week by innovating the story.  We chose farm animals instead of the African animals in the story and developed a picture story plan where each animal ate a different fruit.  We will write up our innovated stories next week.

In maths, we revisited doubles and odd and even numbers.  We noticed how all numbers, when doubled, became even numbers.  We used numicon tiles to find a person with the same tile as ourselves to ‘double’ our amount. We then worked out the total and said the sentence. Eg ‘double 2 is4 4’.  We rolled dice and placed the amount we had rolled onto a ten frame using counters.  We then doubled that amount, and placed it on the ten frame and said the total.

We know that an even number contain twos with none left over. An odd number contains twos and one numbers left on it’s own.  This is an odd one out!  We made odd and even aliens with odd or even amounts of eyes, legs, arms etc.  We enjoyed reading ‘One Odd Day’ too!

We enjoyed our walk to St Wystan’s Church on Friday morning.  We had the whole church to ourselves which was amazing and Reverend Steve very kindly showed us around.  We learned that Christians use the church as their place of worship. We talked about all the special areas in the church, such as the alter and font and looked at and even tried on the special clothes that are worn in church services. Reverend Steve played the organ for us - it was very loud.  The most exciting part, however, was seeing him ring the church bells!  We sand a song together and listened to a story too.  We will put some pictures on our web page for you to see.  A big thank you to the parents that helped us to walk!

In PSHE we talked about how to be a good friend and how to show respect for others.  We used our puppet and a teddy and explained that teddy was very sad because the puppet has not been a good friend to him.  Puppet feels bad but doesn’t know what to do.  We talked about how we can help puppet to be a good friend and improve her behaviour.

In Monster Phonics this week, we have learned Tricky Witch’s phoneme ‘air’, as well as recapping the ‘igh’ trigraph from last week.  Please continue to read with your child regularly.  It really makes a difference to their confidence and fluency. Please also continue to use spelling shed.  Again, this really helps the children to develop confidence and fluency with their segmenting and spelling skills.

Have a lovely weekend and we will see you on Monday, for our final week of the Spring term!  (We will be closed on Good Friday). 😊