Welcome back!  We hope you all had a wonderful Easter break.

This week we learned all about what plants need to grow in our new topic, ‘Growing and Changing’.

We looked at a real plant, took it from its pot and noticed what was at the very bottom.  We talked about the parts of the plant, what they were called and what job they had.  We drew and labelled the parts of the plant; roots, stem, bud, leaves and petals.

We got busy with our green fingers, by planting our own beans and cress seeds!  We talked about what they might need to grow and learned that plants need water and sunlight to grow healthily.  We set up an experiment to find out what the plants needed by putting 4 beans in different conditions, (dark and light) and gave 2 water and 2 no water.  We predicted what we thought would happen in a weeks’ time and will keep an eye on them over the next few days and weeks to see if we were correct.

We read the story ‘The Enormous Turnip’ and drew our own story maps of the story.  We used this to retell the story, using the story language of ‘they pulled and pulled, but the turnip would not come out!’

In maths this week we explored pattern by identifying, making and continuing repeating patterns.  We watched Mrs Tarrant make patterns using her hands, for example, patting her head and clapping in a sequence.  The children joined in with the pattern when they spotted them.  We then represented the patterns pictorially, like the picture below.  We then used all our favourite small parts to create our own repeating patterns and talked about them to our friends. 

Our Monster Phonics this week, we have learned Tricky Witch’s trigraphs ‘ear’ and ‘ure’. 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.  The story of The Frog and the Coin is attached again, containing the ‘ure’ and ‘ear’ trigraphs, should your child wish to read to you!

In PE we enjoyed ‘Spy School’ where we travelled around the room using different parts of our body – to the Mission Impossible music!  The children loved this, and we will continue to progress onto apparatus; developing our travelling and balancing skills, using this theme, for this term.

Have a lovely weekend!