This week we learned about the life cycle of a chick.  We stuck our own pictures into a cycle and talked about how a chick grows and changes.  We then wrote our own information texts about the chick, such as “The hen lays the egg. The chick grows inside the egg.”

Can you tell someone what the stages of a hen’s life are?

We watched a fascinating video of a chick hatching out of an egg.  We learned lots of facts, such as it takes 20 days for the chick to grow and then hatch out.  It uses a special tooth called its ‘egg tooth’ to peck its way out of the shell.

We also learned about the famous French artist, Claude Monet.  We looked at his painting ‘Water Lilies’ and made our own water lilies painting in the style of Monet.  We colour washed the watery, pond background last week, with blue and green water colours.  This week, we made lilies to stick on the painting once dried, from paper.  They look beautiful.

In maths we explored sharing and grouping.  We had a teddy bear’s picnic and shared out 12 cookies between 2 teddies, then 3 teddies and observed what happened to the amount of cookies they got each time.  We added more plates and found the teddies had fewer cookies each time.  We understood that to share equally was fair; ensuing each teddy had the same amount each time with none left over.  We also used 10 pens to group into sets.  We were told that we needed to put 2 pens into a pot.  How many pots did we need? What about 3 pens in a pot? Was that possible? We found we had 1 pen left over.

Our Monster Phonics this week, we have continued to read and write ccvc+ words using our previously taught digraphs.  We also continued to write and use our 3 new tricky words – ‘your, here, saw’.  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 also planted out our bean plants and have brought home our sunflowers to continue caring for and planting at home. We hope they grow really tall!

Have a lovely half term break.  We will see you again on Tuesday 3rd June.