Welcome to the Summer Term

 Hello Hedgehog Parents,

It was lovely to have all 22 Hedgehog children back this week! What with chicken pox, covid and the Easter holidays, it's been a long time since we were all together again.  In true Hedgehog style the children have had a happy, positive week together. 

This term things will be a little bit different. To help with transition to Squirrel Class, the Year 1 children will be doing their Mantle of the Expert with myself and the Year 2 children. During this time Reception will take part in a variety of child-led and adult-led activities, mainly outdoors, with Mrs Gyau-Awuah. We will also continue to do lots of storytelling and drama as a whole class through our literacy lessons which will focus on traditional tales. 

We started with Jack and the Beanstalk. We thought about what breed of cow Jack might be selling, then the children were given the task of creating some collage cows:

The children went on to try to sell their cow, using adjectives. One of the Year 1 spelling objectives is to add -est to an adjective to change its meaning: so, you will see above some cows that will give you the sweetest milk, that have the pinkest noses and the softest fur. The children went on to write down their descriptions. 

In other news, there are two guinea pigs in school called Edward Whiskers and Sebastian. The children learnt how to carry out their daily care this week and will be doing so in small groups each day.  We have also done a lot of country dancing practice ready for Sunday's May Fayre. 


Maths this week.

Reception have been taking part in some low-key maths assessments to see what needs to be taught next. 

Year 1 have begun a unit of work on multiplication. They learnt how to identify and make equal groups, and how to describe them using mathematical language. For example: There are 5 groups, with 3 in each group. 

You can practice this by making equal groups out of anything you can find: lego bricks, pasta on a plate, soft toys.....  . The important part of this is that your child can articulate what they see using the above example of a sentence. 

Phonics this week.

Reception have learnt that the 'ur' phoneme can be spelt using: ur  and  ir
You can practice these using this activity or this activity - both require you to read each word together, spotting the ur or ir grapheme, and then decide whether it is a real or a nonsense word. 

Year 1 have looked at  air  (as in 'pair') and ear (as in 'bear'). These are a bit tricky, because there aren't really any rules as to which one is used when. So here is the spelling list - I've kept it quite short, because of the lack of rhyming patterns and other tips and tricks! The main thing to remember is that air is much more common than ear.

Have a lovely bank holiday weekend - see you on Sunday, and then on Tuesday!

From Mrs Simpson