This week we have asked the question, ‘what makes me special?’  To explore this, we read the story of ‘Elmer’, the elephant with many colours.  We discussed the story and how although Elmer was different, this made him special.  We read how he used his colours for lots of good.  We discussed how we were special (kindness, a good friend, what we were good at doing, etc) and to whom we were special.

We painted pictures of elephants and decorated them in different colours and patterns.  The children then cut them out.  They look fabulous and are hanging on our ceiling in an Elmer parade!

We also learned about the elephants of India that are decorated in bright patterns for the Holi festival.  The children learned lots of facts about elephants, such as what they eat, how they keep cool and where they come from.

In English we read the story Brown Bear, Brown Bear and the children learned to repeat the phrases in the story, ‘Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see?  I see a red bird looking at me.’ They then chose their favourite animal from the story to draw and write about, listening for the sounds in the words and writing what they could hear.  Eg ‘rd bd’ for red bird.

In maths we sorted objects to a type and created sorting rules.  We read the story ‘The Button Box’ and noticed all the different types of buttons in the story.  We loved how the boy sorted collections of different types of buttons, by colour, size, shape, etc.  We used our own buttons and sorted them by colour, shape and even the number of holes in the buttons.  We had to try and guess Mrs Riley’s rule, such as red and not red, or buttons with 2 holes and buttons with 4 holes.

In Monster Phonics this week we learned the sounds o c k ck.  The children are practising recognising these sounds along with the others that we have learned so far. We also practise building simple cvc words and reading them by breaking them down into their single phonemes like robots.  We have sent home the second set of tricky words for the children to learn.  Please try and keep these in their reading diaries.  More will be sent home during the year.  Please see the video in the Monster Phonics section of our class page to see the actions for these sounds and practise those from the start to ck.