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