Most of our activities this week centred around the well-known story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In literacy we have been reading different versions of the story. Throughout the week we read books together under the visualiser, encouraging the children to read along and then discussed different aspects of the book. The children were also encouraged on the snow day to watch it on http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/short-stories/little-red-riding-hood. Well done to Harrison who not only watched it but built a lovely house with his Lego.
The children wrote sentences about pictures from the story using their word grid and word book. They reordered pictures to retell the story and then told it verbally. Groups of children acted out the story with the puppets and everybody managed to play their part with loud, clear voices. In ‘shared writing’ the children made lists of all the things they knew about ‘real’ bears. Sophia was especially knowledgeable about polar and told us lots of interesting facts. We watched clips of bears salmon fishing, polar bears on the ice and at the zoo and pandas in China.
In phonics the sounds taught and practised were ‘igh’ and ‘ie’ and ‘oa’ . We looked at real words and ‘alien’ words and stories with these sounds in and practised writing words on the phoneme frames using these sounds. The children are doing really well learning these sounds so please continue to practise them daily and point them out to your child when they appear in a word in their reading book or word box.
In maths we have been doing lots of work on addition and subtraction both mentally and as practical work. Our work about using the language of size to compare similar objects highlighted the need to move the children on from describing everything as big or little. Lots of comparison work is needed using the language of small, smaller, smallest, big, bigger, biggest. The same ‘need’ was present when comparing how heavy objects were using the balances. They need to be able to compare by saying e.g. this yellow ball is heavier than the blue one but lighter than the red one.
In our ‘Knowledge and understanding of the world’ we followed instructions on how to make porridge and then most of the children enjoyed eating it! We learnt about different birds that we hope to see when bird watching next week and made bird cakes to encourage birds onto our school site. Our paintings of birds using the watercolour paints for the first time were interesting to look at. It is very hard for young children to draw by observation but by looking at a photograph they tried to get the shape, position of the legs and the correct colours.
Music was about Goldilocks and the children loved the Goldilocks rap!
Show and Tell was interesting when the children showed us their family photographs and then told us all about them in lovely loud voices. Unfortunately we had to use the visualiser for most of the pictures so not everybody had their turn but we will continue on Monday.
In ICT we practised used a Goldilocks drag and drop programme in My World to practise mouse control. The children also programmed Bee-Bot to move around a Goldilocks and the Three Bears grid. Counting on the correct number of squares from where the robot was, seemed to be a lot better. There is one more session of programming next week before we move on to a new area.
Next week we continue our work about bears by looking at our teddy bears and bears in stories. Do not forget your teddy on Monday please .