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!  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 wrote sentences about the animals that helped the man to pull out the turnip, writing where he found them on the farm. 'The pig was on the log' or 'The sheep was on the hill', for example.

In maths this week we looked at the numbers 11, 12 and 13.  We represented them in different ways using numicon, cubes and 10 frames and noticed how each number was made of one full 10 and 1, 2 or 3 more of the next 10.  We could therefore, conceptually subitise these amounts to say how many without the need to count!  We understand that the numerals are written as such, for example, 12 is written like this as it means 1 full ten and 2 more.

We explored our emotions in PSHE. We used facial expressions to show different emotions such as happy, sad, angry, excited, worried and surprised.

In Monster Phonics this week, we have begun to read and write cvcc words, such as 'lamp, sink and camp'. This term practises recognition and recall of Phase Two and Three graphemes and reading and writing sentences. Please also continue to use spelling shed.  Again, this really helps the children to develop confidence and fluency with their segmenting and spelling skills. 

In PE we enjoyed a special Soccerstars session! The children absolutely loved practising football skills and playing mini matches. If you would like to sign your child up for Soccerstars session, after school on Tuesdays, please see the flyer that is in their bookbag.

Have a lovely weekend!