Week 1

Wow - what a busy first week back! It was lovely to see you all at parents evenings, either online or in person, and also what fun was had at the sparkly disco!

This week we started 'morning jobs' - these jobs keep the children busy first thing whilst the other children come in and put their things away etc. The children have been spilt into 5 groups and rotate round the five activities across the week. I was so impressed with how quickly they have picked this up - well done Hedgehogs! 

We've also been enjoying our newly revamped outdoor area - we've had a track and a hopscotch painted and we think it looks fab! We have also had a very kind donation of 'Balance Bikes' from Shaun and the team at the South Derbyshire Active Sports Partnership. We're just waiting on a delivery of helmets so we can use them but we can't thank Shaun enough for them, they're going to make such a difference to us improving our gross motor skills and core strength!

Phonics

In phonics we learnt 3 new digraphs - ll, ss, ff and a new grapheme - j. We also learnt a new tricky word - as - and it's tricky because the /s/ doesn't make a /s/ sound, it makes a /z/ sound!

We've also read lots of words this week like: hut, peck, huff, off, puff, mess, fuss, hiss, bell, hill, tell, jug, jam, jet etc. 

Other learning this week:

We learnt all about the Hindu festival of Diwali and the Story of Rama and Sita. We learnt how Hindus celebrate this special time and made our own Diva Lamps out of clay. We're going to paint and decorate these next week. 

In English we started our new writing unit based on the book 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt'. We came up with lots of noticing words to describe what the grass looked like and then had a go at writing these using our phonics skills. Some of the words we came up with were: long, wavy, tall, spiky, green, prickly.

In maths, we've been exploring 2 shapes - circles and triangles. We learnt that circles are special because they have one curved side and triangles are special because they have 3 straight sides. 

At the end of the week we learnt about why and how we celebrate 'Bonfire Night'. We heard the story of Guy Fawkes and how he tried to blow up the houses of parliament. We also talked lots about firework and bonfire safety and how we can stay safe when watching fireworks. Below are the safety rules we talked about.