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? 

The children explored fruit 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 who their book character was.  We enjoyed lots of activities, such as reading Monstersaurus and thinking about how we would make our own potions to make a monster.  We also made book marks, with our names on and decorated spoons into our own characters! We looked at all the school's spoons in the hall on Friday. Thank you to parents for providing these and their embellishments.

In maths this week, we have explored the composition of 10 using Numicon.  The children used 2 or 3 parts to make 10.  We used language such as ‘6 is a part and 4 is a part.  There are 10 altogether.’  Some children were able to record their findings by writing the amounts that made 10 in a number sentence.  This is good practise to reinforcing the children’s subitising skills, as they could subitise the parts to 5 or even 6, due to the arrangement of the pieces.  They could see when they had 10 by noticing five 2s in the pattern. We also explored whether the numbers were odd or even and were really good at remembering and noticing that even numbers had twos and odd numbers had one left over.

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 😊