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 linked this to our PSHE and discussed how we are special (kindness, a good friend, what we are good at doing, etc) and to whom we are special. We learned that we are all different to one another and talked about our differences too. We also read the story 'I am Special, I am Me!'

We painted pictures of elephants and decorated them in different colours and patterns.  The children then cut them out.  They look fabulous and are displayed on the wall 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, what  do you see? 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. We also listened for and wrote initial sounds of other animals, such as c for cat and d for dog.

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 Tarrant’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 practised building simple cvc words and reading them by breaking them down into their single phonemes like robots.  We have now sent home set 1/2 of the high frequency words for the children to learn.  Please try and keep these in their reading diaries.  More will be sent home during the term.  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. 

A reminder that next week sees our parents' evenings on Monday and Thursday. Your appointment times were sent to you on Parenthub.  You can wait in the hall, then come over to the classroom a few minutes before your appointment and wait inside.  We will have the meeting in our side room.  Many thanks!

Have a lovely weekend!