First of all, a Happy New Year to you all and I hope you all had a restful break. The Hedgehogs have returned back to school with an incredible attitude and a willingness to learn, and we have had a fantastic week. Look below to see what we have been up to this week.

Maths 

In our Maths learning, we have started our new unit which is all about Place Value and numbers up to 20. This week we have really focused on counting numbers up to 20 and checking we can count forwards and backwards to 20. We have also focused on being able to identify 10 straight away. This has helped in understanding the numbers 11, 12 and 13. Next week, we will be looking at the numbers 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19. Can you carefully count the numbers below by counting the tens first, and how many ones there are leftover? Maybe you could write the numbers in words as well as a challenge!

English

In our English learning, we have started learning a new Talk 4 Writing text called The Giant Jumperee, by Julia Donaldson. It is a 'Tale of Fear' story where a character is scared of something, the fear gets worse and eventually something comes along to get rid of that fear. We started to act out the story using puppets, and then we created our own story maps of the story. We then built a story map using our Mighty Writer story map kit, which you can find a picture of below. We really enjoyed the story! Can you tell your grown-up the story of the Giant Jumperee, just by using the story map?

Geography

Now that we have finished all of our History learning, we are now moving on to our Geography learning for this term. In this term, we are going to learn all about Kenya and the UK. You can find a knowledge organiser with pictures and information about what we will be learning on the 'Curriculum' tab of the Hedgehogs class page. 

We started this week by looking at pictures of what we will be learning about and creating a topic page to go at the front of our books. On Wednesday, we started to focus on where we live. We learned that we live in the United Kingdom, which comprises of four countries. We listened to a fun song to help us remember the four countries, which you are welcome to watch here. The children had the task of using a map to put the pieces of the UK back together. We then had to match the flag and the names to the correct countries as well. Here are some pictures of our children in action!

PE

We are very lucky to have a coach with us on Thursdays for our PE lessons. Liam, the coach, is teaching our children a new sport, Boccia. The children enjoyed their lesson with him and they will have Liam teaching them skills to do with Boccia for the next 5 weeks. Here are some pictures of the children throwing bean bags to get close to a cone so that we are prepared for actual Boccia next week!

Spellings (also available on Spelling Shed)

Have a lovely weekend everyone and well done Hedgehogs for a super first week back!

Mr Armishaw