We hope you had a lovely half term break. The children have come back and settled right in as though they have never been away. We are continuing our Growing and Changing topic by learning about minibeasts this term. This week we asked the question ‘what do we know about spiders?’ We learned many facts about spiders such as how many legs they have, how many eyes, what they eat and how they spin a web.  We watched a spider spin a web on a time lapse video.  It was amazing!  We also learned why spiders don’t stick to their web, yet other insects do – before they eat them!  We did an experiment, where we made a sticky web from sticky tape and threw small toy insects onto it.  They stuck.  We then touched the web and found we also stuck. We then put a little baby oil on our hands and tried touching it again and we did not stick!  We found out that spiders have an oil on their legs which stops them sticking to their webs.

We made a variety of spiders in the creative area, using all sorts of media and utilised the skills of cutting, joining, bending and folding that we’ve developed throughout this year. We had lots of lovely spiders – all different and unique. They have gone onto our minibeast window display, which is growing by the day.

We are so lucky to have chicken eggs in an incubator, lent to us by Jacob and Emmie Lowe's dad.  We are taking care of them and are told that they should hatch in 21 days!  We will mark the date on our calendar and keep an eye on how long away it is each day.

Our caterpillars have also arrived! We have a lot! There are 34 pots and each pot has one or more caterpillars inside. They have a special food to eat and we are going to keep an eye on them to see how they change each day. We know from our learning that caterpillars like to eat a lot and grow bigger and bigger. Then they made a chrysalis before changing into a butterfly. Once our caterpillars are chrysalises, we will carefully place them in a special butterfly net to see them change again! Where could we let them free?

In English, we continued the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and recapped our story maps from last week.  We innovated them by changing the character from a caterpillar to another minibeast of our choice and then chose different foods for it to eat.  We put all this into a story plan and retold our innovated version.  Next week we will write our stories.

We also extended our learning about odd and even numbers. We had remembered that even numbers contain twos with none left over. Odd numbers always have one odd number left over. We thought about what would happen if we tried to share even and odd numbers by 2. We explored this and found that even numbers can share equally and odd cannot. There is always one left over.

Our Monster Phonics this week, we have been practising reading and writing ccvcc words using our previously taught digraphs.  We also continued to write and use our 3 new tricky words – ‘time, out, house, about’.  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. 

Please see our Forest Learning section on our class webpage to see what we got up to this week.

Have a lovely weekend.