Week 17- I wrote to the Zoo....
Thank you to those of you who have been able to spare 10-15 minutes in the mornings to listen to some children read – feedback has been really positive so please please do keep volunteering yourselves – it does not have to be every day (unless you want it to be – we rarely say no to extra support) just let us know either the day before or on the actual day!
So, what have we been learning this week, we will give you a clue.....
I wrote to the Zoo to send me a pet, they sent me a........
What fun we had in Robins this week creating our very own story map for Dear Zoo! Robins were able to use pictures to help them recall the story, helping Mrs Brown to write key words such as 'big' for the elephant and 'tall' for the giraffe, to help us when we were retelling the story.
Once we had drawn the story map together Robins then had a go at independently creating their own story maps, we're sure that you'll agree they are just perfect, so that's right we kept them!
In Maths this week we explored 'parts' and 'wholes', beginning by investigating familiar toys and objects, showing a good understanding that whole things are often made up of smaller parts and that a whole is, therefore bigger than its parts!
Look at how well we worked together to create our new jigsaw puzzle!
We also continued to develop our 'parts' and 'whole' knowledge using our part-part-whole frame cards. In pairs we had 5 cubes and then put our 5 cubes into 2 parts, we then used our stem sentences to say what we had.
......is a part & ...... is a part
5 is the whole
"1 is a part and 4 is a part. 5 is the whole"
In RE this week we listen to the story 'Super Duper You!' and talked about what makes us special and discussed what the word special means. We passed a mirror around and looked at ourselves in a mirror, talking about what we think we are really good at, from physical acts that we do such as kindness to skills that we have.
Robins then talked drew a picture of themselves and something that reminded themselves of what makes them special around their picture so that they could always remember why they are special!
The word of the day on Tuesday was DISCOMBOBULATED – and with a swap around of teaching days between myself andMrs Brown, that is exactly how we were all feeling – all confused, all mixed up and just…..well……DISCOMBOBULATED. We introduced a new element to our Literacy learning – Drawing Club and on Tuesday we listened to the story of the Colour Monster and talked about the vocabulary and what certain words meant and introduced alternative and often challenging new vocabulary such as DISCOMBOBULATED – I know I am repeating the word but once we started saying it we could not stop – the children were so excited and giggly about this new word they were saying it in almost every sentence! We will be doing Drawing Club every Wednesday Thursday and Friday so get ready to hear some very interesting words being used in the correct context!
Talk to your child about feeling DISCOMBOBULATED....in fact this is a great way to get them to open up about their emotions and feelings in a fun way.
As we rolled into the middle of the week Robins were excited to get started with their Purple Mash 2Do tasks! With some of us starting ours this week and this continuing into next week we began exploring mark making on the computer, although it was a bit tricky at first Robins were soon able to change the colour that they were using, experiment with whether they wanted to use a thin or thick tip marker and even knew how to rub out marks that they didn't want!
As they continued to explore mark making, each Robin was able to discuss what they were drawing, adding detail to their pictures and using the mouse to drag and colour in their creations! "Look Mrs Brown, I'm drawing a house!"
It was soon time for Pantomimus and this week was all about developing the children's opportunities to sing by themselves, with lots of opportunities for the children to lead the songs! Robins loved exploring the different instruments, particularly enjoying the drums, scrapers and triangles and also enjoyed the pie song where they had to decide what ingredients they were going to add to the pie....what a delicious pie it was by the end!
On Thursday it was back to the ever so popular Show and Tell and this week we met two rabbits and a dog. We are always impressed with the development of the children's sentence structure and how they add the detail of what is important to them - its great!
And finally we finished our week off by further refining our cutlery skills - yes it was toast time! This week (well, maybe it was really for myself and Mrs Langford but the children seemed excited so we went with it!!!!!), we offered both brown and white bread and children had a choice. It was like a cafe - I was taking different orders left right and centre and Mrs Langford was behind the scenes busy preparing the orders - somehow we managed 13 different orders in the space of a few minutes!