We have had another very busy week in Robins!  This week we have been celebrating Chinese New Year.  We learned that it is the year of the Tiger.  We have been making tiger and dragon masks and puppets.  The children have really enjoyed colouring and cutting out, developing their finger skills along the way!

We have looked at where China is on a map, linking to our map work, and learned that it would take us 12 hours to fly directly to China! We have also learned about some of the Chinese New Year traditions such as cleaning and decorating the house ready for the new year.  We practised some Chinese writing and talked about how it is very different from our writing in England. 

We have enjoyed playing with noodles and trying to pick them up using chopsticks.  We also found out that red and gold are considered lucky colours so many of our pictures and art work used these colours this week. We all made a Chinese lantern out of paper.  We decorated them with red and gold patterns and some Chinese writing. We also tasted some noodles which were very wiggly!

We have also watched a video of a dragon dance and talked about how the dragon moved; high, low, fast, slow, swirling etc.  We noticed that the dragon moved to the beat of a drum which controlled the pace of the dance. We then replicated the dragon dance in PE, moving first by ourselves to the beat of the drum and then with a partner.  We then joined the partners together to form a longer dragon line and finished up by joining together again to make two long dragons.  We used fabric above our heads for the dragon.  It was really good fun! Please see our Chinese New Year page. 

In English, we read the story of the Chinese Zodiac, called “The Great Race”.  It told the story of how the animals all had a race across the river and the first twelve to finish the race were named in the Chinese New Year zodiac.  As the rat finished first (even though he cheated!) the first year was named the year of the rat.  We wrote about the story in our English books and we really enjoyed re-enacting it with the small world animals and some blue fabric. 

In maths this week we have been learning all about numbers 6 and 7.  We have made the numbers on a ten frame and made sets of these numbers around the classroom.  We looked at how the numbers are made up.  E.g. 6 is made up of a 3 and a 3 or a 4 and 2 etc.  We then represented different numbers on a ten frame pictorially by drawing the correct number of counters each time to represent a given number.

Next week in our topic we will continue with our learning about Antarctica.  We will be learning about what animals live there. It is also Children’s Mental Health Week next week and Safer internet day.  We will be talking about both of these in class. Please see parent hubs (3.2.22) for more information.

Home learning

Please remember to log onto Spelling Shed.  This week we are practising spelling “th” words:  path, bath, thin, thick, then, moth, with, this.   

https://www.edshed.com/en-gb/login

Also, please read don’t forget to log in to our on-line reading scheme “Bug Club – Active Learn” where there are many on-line books for your child to read. 

https://www.activelearnprimary.co.uk/login?c=0

On a final note, we have now put the full set of coloured reception tricky words on the website.  This is so if your child is ready to move on, you can do so without having to wait for us to send home the next set.

https://www.repton-pri.derbyshire.sch.uk/reception-tricky-word-list/

Have a fabulous weekend!