This week we have learned all about the Hindu celebration Diwali.  The children have loved listening to the story of Rama and Sita and learning about about the way Diwali is celebrated.  We made beautiful diva lamps from salt dough and painted them in bright colours after they were cooked.  The children also made colourful Rangoli patterns using paint, pencils, pens and coloured rice.  We also looked at the beautiful Mehndi patterns that Hindu women paint on their hands at Diwali time and some children chose to make their own on paper hands.

In English this week the children wrote cvc words to match pictures.  They segmented the words into the 3 sounds and wrote them down to spell the words in their writing books.  They used a sound mat or letter frieze on the wall to help them.  (The sound mats can be found on the Monster Phonics section of our class page, should you wish to use at home.  We are using phase 2 at the moment).

We explored 1, 2 and 3 this week.  The children subitised the amounts and talked about how they looked on a 5 frame.  Eg in 3 they could see a 1 and a 2 and there are 2 empty spaces.  There would be 5 if we had 2 more.  We made groups of amounts by collecting 1, 2 and 3 objects and placed them in a ring with their corresponding numeral.

In our PSHE session we read the story “Anna Hibiscus Song”.  We discussed how Anna likes to sing when she is happy.  We talked about what we like to do when we are happy.  We discussed how we all like to do different things when we are happy as we are all individual and unique.

We enjoyed a movie afternoon for the Peveril House winners’ afternoon.  The Peveril children chose to watch ‘Smurfs’ and we enjoyed it with hot chocolate and cake!

In Monster Phonics this week we introduced the sounds h and b.  The children are practising recognising these sounds along with those we already know.  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 b.  Most children are now able to hear the initial sound in a word and many can segment a cvc word into its 3 sounds, eg: ‘man…..m – a – n’.
 

We have also sent home the second set of high frequency words for the children to learn at home along with their reading books.

Thank you for sharing the children’s reading books with them at home.  They now all have a word book which matches the phonemes they have learned in school to date.  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 half term break.  We will see you back again on Monday 31^st October. 😊