This week we have continued our learning all about The Great Fire of London and learned about what changes happened afterwards so that the fire didn’t happen again.  The children learned that Sir Christopher Wren was instructed to design a new London.  The houses were rebuilt using stone and brick and were not allowed to be built using wood again. They were built much further apart and the streets were made wider.  Fire fighters were also employed and fire carts were introduced with equipment to put out fires in the future.

The children compared houses, fire engines/carts and fire fighters from long ago with those of today.  We worked together to record our ideas and spot the differences!

In English we wrote simple sentences about what we may hear, feel, see and smell in the Great Fire, following on from last week’s lesson.  The children wrote ‘I can see fire’ or ‘I can smell burning’, etc, using the phonics they have learned to date.  They are beginning to develop more independence with this, and hear the sounds in simple words more confidently.

In maths we explored the composition of 5 by using 5 jewels to split into parts.  We placed the parts into a ‘part whole’ model and wrote numerals to show the amounts that we could see within 5.  The children could say, ‘I see a 2 and a 2 and a 1 in 5’, etc.

We had a very exciting video call with Santa on Thursday! The children loved to listen to him talk all about what he does and how he manages to deliver all those presents in one night! They also asked him questions (many on the topic of naughty elves, funnily enough!)  We sang with him too.  Please see the section ‘Visit from Santa’ on our class page.

We have been very busy practising our Nativity on the stage!  Despite all the poorly absent children, we have continued to practise and are almost ready to perform to the school on Monday and to parents on Tuesday!  Fingers crossed for healthy pupils!

In Monster Phonics this week we learned the digraph ‘ar’.  We know that Tricky Witch has changed the sounds a and r to make and ar sound.

Please see the video in the Monster Phonics section of our web page to see the actions for the sounds up to the end.  There are no actions for the remaining digraphs and trigraphs but they link to the monsters.  You can find posters of all of them on the Monster Phonics section of our webpage.

Next week we will be sending home the remaining high frequency words that the children have been learning in class since September.  There are quite a lot for this term, which we understand can be overwhelming for some children, so we ask you to please keep them and practise them at their own pace.  A link to them on the Monster Phonics section of the class web page is below, should you wish to print out more or practise directly online.

Have a lovely weekend!