19th January 2024

As we started yet another chilly week we were soon warmed up and ready to learn more Gymnastic skills! We took our starting pose and began our first routine, we had great fun dancing along to Cotton Eye Joe!

"I love this song!"

"We listen to this song in the car!"

We continued to practice our straddle, pike and tuck moves- look at us go!

Once we had perfected our 3 moves, we then began learning how to do a forward roll! Anita taught us how to ensure that our legs were stretched out, our hands then placed on the mat in front of our feet and then our heads needed to be placed on the mat looking through our legs until we could see what was behind us! Then we safely tucked our chins into our necks and rolled over.....whee....we had so much fun!

Look at all the fantastic writing that Robins have been doing this week! We have been so impressed by how well their letter formation has been coming along, with lots of practice every morning and within our phonics sessions as well as Robins simply enjoying mark making during free flow, they can't get enough of it! Don't forget to practice your 's' and 'a' at home in your new letter formation books ready for Monday!

In Maths this week the children continued to engage in activities that focused on developing their understanding of counting and revisited the concept of cardinality- the last number tells us how many there are altogether! We also had lots of opportunities to count together in sequence!

To warm us up on Monday we played 'Guess the number', where the children needed to feel the different 3D numbers in the bag and guess which Numberblock they matched up to, using their knowledge of number recognition. It was a bit tricky for some of the numbers but the children made great number detectives!

Robins continued to practice their counting by matching the numbers to the correct Numberblock and then helped me to make sure that all the Numberblocks were in the right order after I had muddled them up on my way to school!

Robins just couldn't resist taking their Maths into their free flow this week and used counting at every opportunity, ordering all the different numbers that they could find. What great independent Maths work!

It was the first cooking club since Christmas and the children were eagerly awaiting the news of what we were going to make....drum roll please......as the announcement came that this week we were making scrumptious flapjacks it was met with "mmmm' and "yummy" and "I love flapjacks" and "they might not be the same as the ones I make at home with Mummy", the excitement filled the room! As we washed our hands and prepared our ingredients we were split into two groups, one group completing the first half of the recipe and the second group completing the second half of the recipe -  it was a recipe for success! The children were amazing at using their muscles to mix and stir the ingredients as the mixture became thicker until it was finally ready to be cooked, we just couldn't wait to eat our flapjacks! 

This week in Robins we started our Talk for Writing sessions and began learning the story of 'The Gingerbread Man'. Within these weekly sessions we will learn a short story and put actions to it, many of the actions will remain the same for every story that we learn so that we become very familiar with them. We will then have a go at drawing a simple story map as a class to help us retell the story using our actions. We will repeat the story next week as we have only just started these sessions so why not have a go at talking through the story map at home?

We've also been busy doing some playdough baking this week!

Have you read the school newsletter this week - there is a sentence or two in there about reading. "Miss Oram, our English Lead, shared a quote from The Reading Framework with us this week of ‘Reading for pleasure and how story time and being 'expertly read to' is the 'single most important thing a school can do'. Well in Robins we love a good story and we also love it when different people read stories to us.....therefore.....we love this part too.......we just love everything really.......we would love your help! We are looking to reintroduce "Mystery Reader". In a nutshell, a parent, carer, or grandparent comes into school at about 3.00 and reads the end of the day story to the children - the Mystery part is that the children don't know who will be turning up (we even ask that you keep it a 'secret' from your own child - it adds to the excitement on the day). This year we would like this to happen on a Wednesday and instead of calling it Mystery Reader we are going to rebrand with "I Wonder Who on a Wednesday". If you would like to be our Wonder Who on a  Wednesday Reader, just let us know and we will put a rota together. We can provide a book for you to read, you can bring one that is a family favourite, you can bring puppets, props - we are open to most ideas! (If you can't make a Wednesday but would still like to have a go, again, just let us know - we will accommodate).

Again, keeping with the reading theme, you will have noticed that your child has new 'tricky' words in their book bag - these are the words that will appear in the Red Books and need to be sight read as whole words.

And finally, we finished off the week with our weekly welly walk - there were lots of giggles, smiles, singing and just lovely conversations and friendships....plus the sun was shinning!

Have a great weekend and see you all on Monday.