A very autumnal week: week ending 16th October 2020

 Hello Hedgehog parents,

This week has had an autumnal, harvesty feel to it. On Thursday we decided to go for a walk to spot the signs of autumn. It was an excellent walk. The afternoon children later took out ipads and clip boards and recorded all of the signs of autumn. Here they are, in their autumnal clothing:

Reception:

On Monday in our story the scientists were busy doing their dinosaur-healing things in the hospital when they heard thumping from up on the roof. Surprisingly, the amazing dinosaur egg had hatched! There was a baby dinosaur walking around on the roof. We watched it quietly from a distance before safely bringing it down with Joshua's help (he explained that he could speak baby dinosaur). Once it was down we talked about how we would need to care for it. The children fed it, made it a nest of leaves and made leads to take it out for walks. 

Then, later one one morning we discovered an ENORMOUS dinosaur footprint outside the hospital. The children spent time identifying it and measuring it (it was two children long, or as Flynn, Hannah and Emily later discovered, 109 cubes!). We decided it was a brachiosaurus print. Next, we need to find out why there was a brachiosaurus hanging around our dinosaur hospital. 

 

Maths:

We have been comparing lengths and heights using the words 'longer', 'taller' and 'shorter'. There are lots of fun ways to practice this at home:

* making snakes from paper, beads, or stuffed socks and comparing their lengths. 

* finding sticks while out on a walk and comparing their lengths.

* building towers to talk about height.
* finding out about more dinosaur footprints, drawing them outside and measuring them in children/steps/metres/cubes

* comparing the heights of everyone in the family - you could take photos of the family standing in height order

* comparing feet and hand sizes (you could make foot and hand prints for this).

Phonics:
This week we have learnt two new sounds:   g   and   o

The rest of the time has been spent learning to word build and read! The children have sounds in a pencil case with a phoneme frame (a simple grid of 3 squares). They find sounds to put in the grid and then read the words, e.g. I might ask them to find 'p' 'i' and 'g' and then blend the sounds to find out what word it is. 

At the moment, the children are at the early stages of reading and blending sounds. You can help by:

• doing lots of sound talk around the house (e.g. can you see the p-i-g in the picture?)
• making sounds cards of   s a t p i n m d g o  and helping your children to learn the sounds
• using the sound cards to build words together

Year 1

In our story the children continued to work to get the missing bog baby back. The learnt that the police had found the person responsible, but that she didn't want to give the bog baby back: she was lonely, she wanted a pet and she said she was looking after it well. In response the children wrote a letter to her to persuade her to give it back using phrases such as 'it might die because it needs water.' 

Incidentally, to learn to spell 'because' the children are learning:

big
elephants
can't
always
understand
small
elephants.

We'll let you know if the letters have the desired effect. 

Maths:
With Mrs Davies the children have been making teen numbers using a ten and some more and have been working hard on forming their teen numbers correctly (with the 1 first!). They also started some subtraction using objects, pictures and then jumping back along a number line.  At home you could:

• use 10p and 1p coins to make teen numbers
• do some practical subtraction using objects
• make a number line (to 20 to begin with) and play 'race to 0 - roll a dice, jump back and the first to 0 wins (but if you roll a 6 you have to start again at 20)
• help your child to practice their number formation. This can be with pencil and paper, but it can also be outside with chalk, or in a tray of rice or writing in big numbers on a big piece of paper - any way to make it creative

Phonics:

The children have finished revising phase 3 and brought home a phase 3 booklet. Please help them to complete this booklet over the next few days. 

I think that's all for now. Have a very good weekend and I will see you and your children for the final week of half term next week! How has it gone so quickly?

from Miss Nash

The Hedgehog Story: week ending 9th October

 Hello Hedgehog and Parents,

And, just like that, we've finished another week of hedgehogging.

It's been a good week which ended with our sponsored walk. The children did a wonderful job (there were hills). There are a few photos of it on the school website here. 

Year 1

Our Bog Baby story took a bit of a turn this week. The children wrote some news for the Parks Trust news letter, telling the public about what the bog babies have been up to. This led to a lot of interest in the bog babies, but unfortunately it went to far. The cameras captured someone reaching into the pond to take a bog baby home as a pet. The children immediately decided to construct a fence around the pond and began to bog-napping. A policewoman visited to find out more and asked the children to create some detailed sketch portraits of the suspect. We will keep you updated. Here is a photo of the missing bog baby, in case you happen to see it.

Phonics:

The children looked at 'ur' 'er' and 'ir' which, confusingly, all make the same sound. They learnt that 'er' is often found at the end of words and can sound like a short 'uh' (butter, letter, robber and so on). 

You could play a version of 'hangman' with your child to practice reading these sounds. Tell your child the word will definitely have ur, er or ir in it! Some words you could use:

bird   chirp   girl   third   first   rubber   letter   better   turn   burn   church   

For extra support, you could draw lines matching the sounds, rather than the letters and ask your child to guess sounds - e.g. for church, you would draw  ___ ___ ___  (ch - ur - ch) and for first  you would draw  _  __ _ _. 

Maths:

The children have been subtracting by:

* taking away objects
* crossing out pictures
* counting back along a number line

Please take any opportunity to practice subtracting with your child. A good game is 'race to 0' - all players start with 20, take it in turns to roll a dice and subtract that many until one player reaches 0. The only thing is... you mustn't roll a 6. Anyone that rolls a 6 has to start again! To take the CPA (concrete, pictorial, abstract) approach you could...

* begin with 20 objects and subtract objects until one player reaches 0 (restoring your collection to 20 if you roll a 6)

* have a number line to 20 and jump backwards with each turn until one player reaches 0 

* write number sentences to match as you go, eg 20 - 5 = 15;  15 - 3 = 12;  12 - 4 = 8.....

Reception:

The dinosaur eggs we found in our story last week have been carefully looked after and some have been hatching. The children are learning that in 'our story' anything can happen according to their imagination - so each child decided whether their egg had hatched or not, and if so what had hatched. Surprisingly, though we thought they were diplodocus eggs, we had all sorts of dinosaurs hatching! The children learnt that at the bottom of the next was one large, different egg that just would not hatch, no matter what the scientists did. Together, we created this egg and decided to put it up high so that no one could get it. It is currently on top of our dinosaur hospital and the children are thinking about how to get it to hatch. 

Maths

The children have been doing some sorting and matching this week. We sorted dinosaur eggs, firstly by colour and then by size. We began to use the words 'more' and 'fewer' to compare the groups as well.  You could practice this at home - sorting anything you can find (socks, teddies, food...) and using the terms - especially the word 'fewer'  (we tend to use 'less' but 'fewer' is the correct mathematical term when comparing numbers of objects).

Phonics

Mumford the dragon has helped the children to learn:

s a t p i n m d

and we have looked at the word the 

At home, please help your child to recognise these sounds and words. A good way is to have them up around the house so that whenever you and your child bump into them, you can remember them together. Ask your child to say the sound or word and if they don't know it, then...

1) you say it

2) you and your child say it together

3) they say it alone

(whilst at all times looking at the sound or word).

We also began some oral blending - Mumford talked like a 'robot', saying, for example, 'p-a-t your head' or  't-a-p your nose'. An important skill for early reading is for your child to be able to blend sounds that are heard. You can easily practice this at home, for example say to your child

'Find your s-o-ck'
'would you like h-a-m?'

(try to stick to short words to start with and say the pure sounds in the word. Pure sounds can be found here).

You could also practice writing the letters with your child. If they find holding a pen/pencil hard, you can write with fingers in a tray of paint/flour/lentils etc:

s  -         wiggly like a snake

a d  -     'round, up and down again'

n m p  - all begin 'down, up and over'

t  i  -         straight down the long ladder with a flick at the bottom

Next week, we will be consolidating these sounds and doing a lot of work with them such as writing them in paint/rice/sand (etc) or with pens, finding words that begin with them and beginning to read simple words such as sat, pin, nip. 

I wish you all a very good weekend,

from Miss Nash

Hedgehog Class: The story so far!

 Hello Hedgehogs and your Hedgehog Parents,

Welcome (or welcome back) to the Hedgehog Class Blog. It worked so well for us during lockdown that I thought we should continue it. 

I will be posting a weekly blog about what we have been up to in class with some ways for you (parents) to support your child's learning at home.

Settling in.
Both year groups have been settling into their new routines. The Year 1 children have been spending most of the morning with Mrs Davies, doing focussed maths, writing and phonics work. The Reception children have been getting used to school and learning how to use the indoor and outdoor environments. Thank you for all of your support with wellies, waterproofs and clothing in general - it takes a few weeks to get everyone's clothing where it needs to be and making sure the children can find their own clothes!

Our Mantle of the Expert Stories 
(At school we refer to 'our story').

The SPBB.

The Year 1 children are in the middle of a Mantle of the Expert story about bog babies (if you haven't seen the book 'The Bog Baby by Jeanne Willis, I'd recommend it!). They learnt about bog babies and then were visited by someone from the Parks Trust who thought there might be bog babies in Howe Park Woods. The children became the Society for the Protection of Bog Babies (SPBB) and visited the pond in question to find out more. Sure enough, there seem to be bog babies in Howe Park Woods. The children have just set up some cameras around the ponds to monitor the behaviour of the bog babies - we'll keep you posted. Through this story so far the children have explored..

• clay work
• watercolour painting
• habitats
• animal categories (we think bog babies might be amphibians)
• DT - making junk model cameras
• computing (a brief introduction to stop motion animation)
• some other things along the way!

Dinosaur Island

The Reception children have been dipping their toes into the waters of Mantle of the 

Expert (at school we call it 'our story') with Dinosaur Island. They created an island together and added geographical features. Then they became a team of scientists working in secret to find out more about the creatures on the island. It turns out... there are dinosaurs there! We created some camouflage clothing and went dinosaur-spotting. We found lots of dinosaurs including an injured triceratops, which led to us making a dinosaur hospital. The children have spent lots of time helping injured dinosaurs. Then, on Thursday, the children learnt of a diplodocus that had been sadly killed while protected its nest of eggs. The children created a nest from natural materials out on the field and thought about what the eggs might look like. This led to a happy few minutes moulding clay and pushing stones, twigs and other materials into it to create a nest of dinosaur eggs. We will see what the next chapter of the story brings!

Year 1 core subjects this week:

Phonics: we have been revisiting the phase 3 sounds and have so far covered:

sh ch th ng ai ee igh oa oo or ar ow oi. You can help your child to spot these sounds when they are reading, and this week's game is a favourite to practice reading them:

Maths:

We have been learning to use Cuisenaire to add up. We have been making number bonds to 6 and teen numbers using the ten and some ones rods. We have also been practising writing our numbers. You can help with encouraging your child to practise writing their numbers to 20 the correct way round. You could use a 10p piece and some ones to create teen numbers so children see why a teen is written with a 1 at the start to represent one ten.

Reception phonics and handwriting:

We have started short phonics lessons. A very important part of phonics is the listening involved - children need to be able to hear and distinguish between sounds. We have:

* done a lot of rhyming 

* begun some alliteration (such as the ant ate an apple, the penguin ordered pizza...)

* gone on listening walks to hear sounds around us

We have also looked at some letter sounds:

s    a    t    p

We had a go at making the shapes of the letters in a tray of rice which the children enjoyed. 

s  - nice and curly

a - round, up and down

t- all the way down, a flick and a cross

p - down, up and over

At home, you can do lots of rhyming and alliteration and play 'eye spy' using the letter sounds rather than the names. For help with letter sounds, see this YouTube video. 

You could also..

Complete this rhyming sheet

Play 'I Spy' using this sheet. 

I hope you have a marvellous weekend - see you next week!

from Miss Nash