Spring Term Week 6: A mystery and some guests in our classroom

 Hello Hedgehog Parents,

What a warm and spring-like week it's been! We've had a great week and were joined by Year 2 for Wednesday and Thursday. The children all did their own lessons depending upon their year group, but we came together for Forest School and our Mantle of the Expert story; it was lovely to have the older children with us for a while. 

We also had the pleasure of Year 4's company on Tuesday afternoon. They read stories to Reception and then taught them some maths using play dough! The Reception children loved having the older children around. 

Aside from that, our Mantle story continues. The children were contacted by an archaeologist called Rashka who needed their expertise as Elephant Keepers. She had come across an unusual painting in a cave in Russia - it was about 20,000 years old and appeared to depict an elephant. She wanted our advice. 

We looked at the images and then decided it would help to visit the caves ourselves. The children (with Year 2) learnt a bit about cave art using charcoal and then created the caves. The next day, the Elephant Keepers visited the caves and met Rashka. Together, we decided that the art work was not of elephants, but was in fact pictures of woolly mammoths! 

This led to the children learning some interesting facts about mammoths. 

In other learning:

Maths:

Reception children have been focussing on the number 4 and its parts. To do this, they have been using 4 squares of card to make formations of 4 and talk about them, for example 'There are 3 in a row and 1 on top, that makes 4'. 

If you want to practice this, give your child lots of squares of card, or similar. Together, see how many formations of 4 you can create, covering your floor or a table with them. The only rule is that the squares must touch the side of the next square, such as this:

Year 1 children have finished their work on addition and subtraction and have begun a unit of work on numbers to 100. 

You could try a number square jigsaw to practice the sequence of numbers. 

Phonics:

Reception children learnt  ng, ai  and ee this week. To practise this, play 'noughts and crosses'. To practise this, write out these silly sentences (one at a time) and ask your child to read them before drawing a matching picture. It helps to underline the digraphs to help your child to spot them, before reading them. 

The cat can sing in the rain. 
The sheep was long. 
My feet had a tail. 

Year 1 children learnt ve and ph this week. 

We did not manage to do last week's spelling challenge today. We will do it instead on Monday, using last week's words.

So instead of a spelling challenge next week, you could use these ve and ph words to create some silly sentences. If you create a particularly good sentence, please bring it in to show me!

Have a good week end!

From Mrs Simpson

P.S. Here are a few photos from this week.