This week we started our learning about AFRICA!  We asked the question ‘what is it like in Africa?  We started by looking at photos of Africa and the people who lived there, the children made observations and talked about what they noticed.  We compared Africa to the UK, such as the differences in houses, people, weather and the landscape.  We looked where Africa is on a map and compared it to where Antarctica is.  We know that Antarctica is very cold, and learned that the middle of Africa is very hot.  We learned that this is because Africa is on the equator and it is closer to the sun. 

Can you tell someone what Africa is like?  How is it different to the UK? 

We enjoyed reading the story Handa’s Surprise which is set in Africa.  Handa takes a basket of fruit to her friend Akeyo and by the time she reaches him, the fruit has turned into a basket of tangerines! 

The children explored fruit again this week and used our sense of sight, to look closely and carefully drew the fruit at the art table. They have made some brilliant observational drawings and paintings to go on our learning wall. 

Maybe you can find some fruit to draw at home?  What does it look like cut in half?  Think about the colours, lines and shapes.

We had a great World Book Day!  The children looked fabulous in their costumes and could talk about why they were wearing them and what their special word was.  We enjoyed lots of activities, such as reading The Rainbow Fish and thinking about what letter the other fish may like to write to the Rainbow Fish to be friendly, then writing our own letters.  We also made book marks, designed book covers, enjoyed stories with our grown ups and other adults and shared books with each other.  

We practised all our key skills learned in number so far this week, by recognising numerals, order numerals, counting out objects to match the numerals – carefully using 1-1 correspondence and knew when to stop when we said the number that we needed.  We also used our subitising and conceptual subitising skills to make and see amounts on the 10 frame.  We turned over a numeral card and then made that amount on the 10 frame, knowing that we didn’t always need to count; we knew that a whole line was 5 and one more, for example, would be 6 or one less would be 4.  We knew that if we needed to make 9, we just left one square on the 10 frame empty as 9 is one less than 10.

In Monster Phonics this week, we have learned Tricky Witch’s phoneme ‘er’.  It also features in our Floatella story from last week.  We wrote and read many words with this sound in as well as recapping the oa sound from last week.

Have a lovely weekend and we will see you on Monday 😊