This half-term our topic is Magic! We have learnt lots of new stories and have had so much exploring magical things in our environment. Our teachers say this half-term they have seen the magic happen with our learning, and they can't believe how much progress we have made with reading, writing and maths. We are becoming very confident learners! 

Spectacular Stories

We have been inspired by some amazing stories in our Literacy lessons. Here are a few of our favourites. During our literacy lessons, we used these stories to construct simple sentences with capital letters and full stops. We have also started to explore using adjectives to describe characters. In our playtime we used these stories to take us to magical worlds. In our small world area, we have created our own stories with witches and fairies. In our role-play area, we have a potion lab where we create our own magical potions and turn our teachers into frogs and elephants! We even received a letter from a fairy, so we wrote our wishes down and sent them back to fairy land. 

 

Marvellous Mud Kitchen

We still LOVE the mud kitchen. This half term we have been using the mud kitchen to make our own magical concoctions. We have explored using new tools such as ladles and slotted spoons. We now know that ladles are better to transport our mixtures because they don't have holes in them. This half-term we have also been using graters to grate chalk onto our cupcakes. We think it makes our cakes look delicious! We are very careful when we use the graters and wear gloves to protect our fingers. Just when we thought it couldn't get more exciting, our teachers added bicarbonate of soda, vinegar and pippettes to the area. We followed the recipe and added 3 scoops of the powder and 1 pippette of vinegar to our cakes. It was so exciting to see the cakes start to explode, we thought it looked like a volcano. When we listened carefully, we could hear fizzing sounds! It was AMAZING!  

 

 

 

Fantastic Phonics

This half-term we have completed our phase 3 phonics. We now know 48 sounds and so many new harder to read and spell words.

It is really impressive that we are recalling these when reading and writing, not just in our learning but in our play time too! We are superb at using our spelling sequence to sound out words and can use the sound mats independently to select the sounds we need. Each day we have a phonics table and love to practise our sound of the day. For the sound 'ar' we have to read the words and park the cars into the spaces. 

We also go hunting for harder to read and spell words in our books. When we find a harder to read and spell word we keep track with ticks and tallies on post-it notes. We are great HRSW detectives!

Magnificent Mathematicians

We are excellent at subitising now, and we don't have to count things we can see because we just know the amount. We are now starting to see how different numbers are made so we can subitise patterns in different arrangements. 

   

Amber said "This 5 like it is on a dice"                             Amber knew "This is 5 because I see 3 and 2"

  We have also been learning about counting and ordinality. We have been learning how to count objects and remembering how to stop at the stopping number. 

We have also been ordering numbers from smallest to biggest. We play games where numbers are hiding, and we have to say who is missing and explain how we know. Our teachers are so impressed with our reasoning skills!

Chinese New Year

We have been really interested in learning about Chinese New Year. We learnt how Chinese people celebrate their special day and enjoyed exploring different activities based on their culture.

 We were fascinated by The Great Race story and loved finding out how the animals were chosen for each year. In the afternoons, we made our own animal racetrack by cellotaping the animals to cars and finding out who won! We also learnt about snakes and created our own snake art. 

 

 

 

 

We wanted to know more about Chinese Dragons so we had a look at a Chinese parade and had a go at making our own dragons. 

Our teachers even added noodles and chopsticks into the mud kitchen - we loved exploring and making our own Chinese feast, but we decided chopsticks are very tricky to use!

We have so much more to learn! Stay tuned to find out what happens in February! Our next upload will be on 28/2/2025.