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 made our own African animal patterns on the art table using paints and small brushes, after looking closely at pictures of their skin and fur.

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 had a lovely visit from Mr Armishaw and the Hedgehogs class on Friday afternoon, who had made Masai Mara tribal masks in class and wanted to share with us. We listened to all the facts the Hedgehogs knew about the Masai Mara tribe and their masks, clothes and ways of life. It was fantastic!

We wrote a story based on Handa's Surprise by changing the fruits that Handa picked and put into her basket. We also used adjectives to describe the fruits. We wrote sentences after saying them, such as "She put in a red apple". Some children wrote slightly longer sentences, such as "She put a juicy and soft peach in the basket".

In maths, we revisited doubles and odd and even numbers.  We noticed how all numbers, when doubled, became even numbers.  We used numicon tiles to find a person with the same tile as ourselves to ‘double’ our amount. We then worked out the total and said the sentence. Eg ‘double 2 is 4’.  We rolled dice and placed the amount we had rolled onto a ten frame using counters.  We then doubled that amount, and placed it on the ten frame and said the total.

We know that an even number contains twos with none left over. An odd number contains twos and one numbers left on it’s own.  This is an odd one out!  We made odd and even aliens with odd or even amounts of eyes, legs, arms etc.  We enjoyed reading ‘One Odd Day’ too!

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 felt bad but didn’t know what to do.  We talked about how we could 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.

We had a fun red nose day, where we all dressed up - thank you for your efforts and donations to support Comic Relief.

We are walking to St Wystan's church next Thursday to support our learning about churches, places of worship and Easter. If you can help us to walk to the church, please let us know, as we will need a few parent helpers to walk down, stay with us walk back.

Many thanks and have a lovely weekend.