Week 6: Caring for injured animals, autumn poetry, and more.

 Greetings Hedgehogs and Hedgehog Parents,

Parents, I hope you have had as good a week as we have had in Hedgehog Class. It started by identifying some animals around the park that had unfortunately been injured by the storm. The children stepped into the story, became Percy's park keepers, and set to work. Percy's hut was soon filled with animals needing our help. The following day the Year 1 children discussed what animals need to survive (air, food, water and shelter) and learnt a bit more about what to feed the different animals. They used the terms carnivore, herbivore and omnivore to describe animals and advised Percy on what to feed the different animals. 

At Forest School we (once again) discussed blackberries! The children learnt that the blackberries are not really there for us (though we love them!) but are there to feed the birds, so this week we all agreed just to eat one blackberry so the birds could have full tummies. The children had another great session and some of them made some Forest School pictures in frames (see photos below).

We have also been rehearsing for next Friday's Harvest Assembly in the church. Year One children have some words to learn, so please help your child to practise reading them.

Here are a (very) few photos of the week - once again, in all the busy-ness few photos got taken!. Maths and Phonics are below.

Maths:

Reception children have been continuing their work on the principles of counting. Counting can be practised in any way, all over the place. If you have a child who is confident on the principles of counting, you could ask them to teach you how to count, encouraging them to articulate their ideas really carefully.

You could also practise subitising to 3 (this means children quickly recognise there are 3 items or pictures, without having to count) and asking your child to represent 3 in different ways, eg 'Can you draw 3 pigs in a field? Can you put three dinosaurs into that pen?'. 

Year 1 children have continued working on addition. Our focus this week has been on the = (equals) sign and what it means - the children are learning that it means 'the same' and that there must be the same number in total on each side of the equals sign. 

To practise this, you could help Merlin with his muddle. He completed some number sentences, but then some of the numbers fell out! Can you put them back in the right place?

Phonics

Reception have been building cvc words using s a t p i n m d. To do this, I teach the children to stretch a word out to hear its sounds. So to spell 'pin' we would stretch out pppiiiinnnn to hear the three sounds in it. At home, you could practise this using magnetic letters on a fridge, or giant letters written on A4 card. 

Year 1 children have been looking at oo-oooooo this week (the long and short 'oo' sounds as in book and boot). They have also learnt that sometimes, the short 'oo' sound is written just with an 'u'.

Here is next week's spelling challenge list...

and a game of boggle if you'd like to see how many of the words you can make. 

I'll also be checking the children's progress on spelling their colourful lists next week and will let you know how they get on. 

Have a good week,

From Mrs Simpson