Week 1

Welcome back – what a super start to the first half term of 2023! The children have settled straight back into school and have been ready to learn... well done hedgehogs!

Phonics

This week we started to learn Phase 3 sounds. We have learnt 3 new digraphs and a trigraph too. A trigraph is 3 letters that make one sound.

The sounds we’ve learnt this week are ai, ee, igh and oa. We’ve read lots of words containing these sounds like rain, wait, tail, sail, see, feet, meet, sheep, high, tight, night, right, coat, soap, goat and boat. We’ve also recapped 4 tricky words – is, as, I & the and the spelling of these tricky words too.

We’ve also practiced writing words containing our new sounds at the end of our phonics lessons too – our confidence is really growing and our handwriting is improving too!

I have attached the home learning sheet below if you would like to have a go at home 

English

In writing lessons this week we were introduced to our new story for this half term - Handa’s Surprise by Eileen Brown. We looked at the front cover of the book and discussed where the story could be set. We inferred that the story couldn’t be set in Willington because we don’t have ostriches roaming around! Mrs Braddock told us that the story is set in Kenya, Africa. We then read the first page – where Handa puts 7 different fruits into a basket for her friend Akeyo.

Mrs Braddock had brought the fruits in for us to look at, smell and taste! We were so good at coming up with lots of different words to describe their taste and smell. We then had a go at writing some of these words in our English books.

Maths

In maths this week we have been exploring shapes with four sides – rectangles and squares. We learnt that rectangles have 4 straight sides and 4 corners and squares also have 4 straight sides and 4 corners. But… squares are special because all 4 sides are the same length! We then went on a shape hunt around the classroom, drew shape pictures and played a game where we had to colour in all the shapes with 4 sides.

Topic

Our new topic is called ‘The World Around Us’.  Over the term we will be comparing what it is like to live in Willington to what it is like to live in Africa – like Handa. We started this by looking at where Willington is in the world – we enjoyed using Google Earth to find school, the Co-Op and the streets where we live too! We then looked at where Africa is and talked about how big it is compared to the UK.