This week we asked the question, ‘Where do people go to worship?’  Following our visit to the Church, last week, we reminded the children that a church is a special place for Christians to go to worship God.  We talked about the features of the church and what happened in a church.  We learned that there are many other places of worship for people who believe in different gods, such as a Mosque, a Synagogue and a Gurdwara. We looked at pictures of the different places and talked about their similarities and differences.

We also begun learning about Easter, a Christian festival, that Christians believe is a time to celebrate Jesus, and when he came back to life.  We read The Easter Story and the children were fascinated!  We then discussed how Easter is celebrated and maybe even in our own homes, by talking about the giving and receiving of Easter eggs and the Easter Bunny, giving Easter cards, eating hot cross buns and having a special meal with the family.

We made Easter cards to bring home and as a link to new life and spring, we painted daffodils on the art table, by carefully looking at real daffodils and matching and mixing colours.

We continued our story ‘Handa’s Surprise’ this week by using our story plan from last time to write a new version of the story.  For example, ‘The cat ate the banana. The pig ate the carrot. The sheep ate the tomato.’  At this time of year, the children are just able to write simple sentences like this independently, by saying the sentence, sounding out each word (segmenting) and writing them down.  Practise with simple sentences like this at home will really help your child’s independence and confidence to develop.

We explored the composition of 10 this week.  We began by ordering numerals to 20, practised recognising them and counting forwards and backwards.  We then looked at what 10 looked like on a 10 frame and the numbers we could see within it, such as 6 and 4 or 2 and 2 and 6.  We then practised our 1-1 correspondence by counting out amounts of jewels to match each numeral to 10, then up to 20.  We represented these amounts on 10 frames.

We enjoyed a Busy Bodies Easter egg hunt on Thursday.  The children looked around our setting for lots of eggs which had instruction on. When they had all been found we joined together to follow the instructions on the eggs.  We had to do things such as ‘jump 10 times’ or ‘hop one leg for 20 seconds’.  We were very fit and busy!

Our Monster Phonics this week, we have learned Tricky Witch’s phoneme ‘oi’. Below is the powerpoint of the story we read in class this week, The Frog and the Coin. You could read at home with your child if you wish.  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.

Have a lovely Easter break and we will see you on Monday 17^th April 😊