TERM 3 - WEEK 3

As the mist and fog descended on our village school this week, the cold temperatures certainly stayed with us but that didn't stop Robins rushing through the door on Monday morning ready for the week ahead!

As we mentioned on our previous page, the focus of our morning activities this term is about fully developing our letter formation. Back in Septermber (Term 1) we were exercising all the tiny muscles in our hands in preparation for our writing, we were rolling and moulding playdough, cutting, sticking, using tweezers and stretching loom bands. Term 2 we started drawing and mark making and were gently introduced to writing our name. This term, BOOM, we are flexing our muscles to the max - we are writing, writing, writing!!!!! We are rainbow writing (writing the same letter over and over again so that it sticks in our memory (our sticky knowledge), we are writing simple CVC words such as cat, dog, run etc words we can spell independently and just this morning someone said "I am going to write a sentence all on my own".....and they did (see below - The rat got a pin.) This highlights just how far these children have come in such a short space of time. Of course, we all know that development happens at different rates however we are all heading in the same direction and it is joyous to see the learning and progress happening right infront of our eyes every day.

In our Talk For Writing sessions, Robins have loved using our story map to retell the story of Dear Zoo and are now able to do this without any support so why not get them to show you at home!

Once we had retold the full story we then verbally recited the first part of the story again, this time focusing on what the zoo sent us the first time. 

They sent me a _____________. He was too ______________ so I sent him back!

Of course the zoo sent us an elephant but he was too big! Robins then said the sentence together and worked hard to segment and blend elephant and big! We had created the first page of our story......wow!

On Tuesday we mixed Maths and painting together, it was time for the Numberblocks stampoline episode! This week we had been focusing on developing our understanding of the composition of the numbers 3,4 and 5, composing and de-composing these numbers and investigating them through the part-part whole model.

Robins are becoming increasingly confident when using the language part-part whole and are able to use practical equipment such as cubes to consolidate their knowledge, understanding a whole as being made up of smaller parts.

On Tuesday we moved onto number 4 and Robins really enjoyed practically exploring how 4 could be composed in different ways by building blocks of towers in a variety of different ways and using paint to print them! Needless to say our hands did end up getting a bit messy but they showed a really good understanding. Similarly, on Thursday when we explored the composition of 5, we used the multilink cubes to show all the different ways 5 can be created, we then discussed this with our talk partners andwe even checked them against the Stampolines episode on the BBC iplayer!

In our RE lesson this week we continued to discuss what the word 'special' means to us. When we asked Robins who was special to them, they said....

"My Mum"

"My family"

"My friends"

We discussed how being 'special' to us was someone or something that was important to us. 

This week we went on a story trail and Mrs Brown read 'The calling of the First Disciples', Robins enjoyed listening carefully to each part of the story and finding the corresponding picture to go with each part! This not only helped us to develop our listening skills but also supported us with discussing what the meaning of the story was. 

We couldn't believe how many fish were in the boat at the end of the story (we thought hundreds at least!) and even though the fisherman didn't believe Jesus at first, they trusted him because they knew he was special!

On Wednesday, we were back to Drawing Club. We read the story Mixed by Arree Chung. The story is  a wonderful picture book about celebrating diversity tolerance and embracing difference.

We explored new vocabulary such as harmonious, triple and unseparable. It also linked nicely to our Art session in the afternoon whereby we were learning to colour mix red and yellow using powder paint (this was a new experience for almost all the children). They were absolutely engrossed in the process and listened to each step very carefully, from tapping some powder into the pallet, adding a few drops of water, mixing in the powder until it all dissolved, washing and drying the brush before adding the next colour and finally painting differing shades on the paper. At one point you could hear a pin drop – every pair worked....well.... harmoniously and they even tidied away all equipment without any spillages! Next week we will repeat the process with yellow and blue!

Finally, as you may have already read in this weeks newsletter, this term we are learning to keep to a beat using the djembe drums. We each had a djembe drum and whilst repeating the phrase “walk the donkey, walk the donkey, walk the donkey” we tapped, we smiled, we laughed but we must have forgotten to listen!!!! Rev. Mike tried his very best to get us all to stop playing at the same time but to be honest we were enjoying ourselves too much and even though we must have had at least 10 goes at stopping all at the same time – we didn’t manage it once – we were having far too much fun! 

And finally finally, at the Christmas Fayre one of our Robins won a cupcake decorating experience for her and two friends, so on Tuesday afternoon Mrs Oberholzer took them to decorate some scrumptious cupcakes....what a wonderful experience they had!

Have a great weekend and see you all on Monday.