This week we continued our learning about Africa by finding out all about which animals live in Africa.  We learned about the way they camouflage themselves to hide from predators and enjoyed making our own pictures of the different animals’ fur and skin close up, using paint.  We learned about the animals that are hunted and what they are hunted for, such as elephants for their ivory tusks and leopards for their fur.  We decided that hunting wasn’t good and that it meant the animals were endangered, meaning there weren’t that many left and so could become extinct.

How do animals hide themselves from predators? Who do you think these animal skins belong to?

We enjoyed listening to African music and watching videos of African people dancing.  The music reminded us a lot of jungles and had drums and pipes and bells.  It was very lively.  We made our own dance movements to this music too!

We continued our story ‘Handa’s Surprise’ this week by innovating the story.  We chose farm animals instead of the African animals in the story and developed a picture story plan where each animal ate a different fruit.  We will write up our innovated stories next week.

We learned about money in maths this week and understood different ways in which we pay for things; on a card, phone, watch, cash and online.  We know that when we pay for things we are exchanging the money for something else of the same value.  We sang 5 currant buns and noticed how we exchanged a penny each time for a currant bun.  We sorted coins into their values by looking at the colours, size and numerals on them.  We then played a game with a spinner where we looked at the coin that we landed the spinner on, (1, 2 or 5p) and took the same amount of counters to place on our 10 frame.  We noticed how many we had each time we added more and kept an eye on how many more spaces we needed to fill to make 10.  This was great for exploring the composition of 10 in a fun way.  The QR code for the spinner is below.  The children may like to show you how to play at home.  You can draw your own 10 frames and use buttons, counters or anything to fill it.  Another idea is to use 1p pieces!

or link at the bottom 

We enjoyed our walk to St Wystan’s Church on Thursday morning.  We had the whole church to ourselves which was amazing.  We learned that Christians use the church as their place of worship. We talked about all the special celebrations that happen in a church such as weddings and christenings.  We looked at and learned about all the special things inside the church, such as the stained glass windows, the font, the lecturn and pulpit and the altar.  We all had a turn standing in the pulpit and enjoyed sitting in the choir’s pews at the front.  We will put some pictures on our web page for you to see.  A big thank you to the parents that helped us to walk!

In PSHE we talked about how to be a good friend and how to show respect for others.  We used our puppet and a teddy and explained that teddy was very sad because the puppet has not been a good friend to him.  Puppet feels bad but doesn’t know what to do.  We talked about how we can help puppet to be a good friend and improve her behaviour.

In Monster Phonics this week, we have learned Tricky Witch’s phoneme ‘air’, as well as recapping the ‘igh’ trigraph from last week.  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.

Next week is Parent’s evening on Monday and Thursday after school.  You should have a time slot allocated to you by the end of this week.  We look forward to speaking with you all then.

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