This half term our topic is "Animals" and each week we will learn about a different story. This week we are learning about Jungle Animals and our story has been Rumble in the Jungle!

We have been describing jungle animals this week and have drawn pictures and labelled them. We have been learning about repeating patterns and have been using beads and shapes to make our repeating patterns to look like necklaces. We have been learning to rip and tear tissue paper, which is actually very tricky, and have been learning how to "overlap" to create a collage mask of a tiger. We have loved using our jungle role play area and have been sitting in our jungle jeep to see what animals we can name and spot. Continuing on our pattern theme we have been matching animals to their correct pattern.

This week our mystery readers have been Mrs Lawson, Joseph's grandma and Rowan's mum!

We have had such an exciting week preparing for our visit from The Merry Men and The Sheriff of Nottingham.

In the construction area we have been using various different items to create castles and have been able to explain some of their features. We have used a variety of flat shapes in the maths area to design castle pictures and have named the shapes we used and their properties to describe the pictures. We have used the small world castle to create stories about Robin Hood and his Merry Men and have made a dungeon! We have used foil to make pictures of knights and have been learning to cut, tear, roll and scrunch to make the features. We have used spaghetti and marshmallows to complete a challenge to make the tallest or the widest castle.

The knights visit was really fun! We had a picnic together in our "Sherwood Forest" classroom to begin with. We all got to have a go at archery in the hall and hitting the target was really tricky! The knights talked to us about attack weapons, armour, weapons to defend themselves, clothing and pennants. We learnt so many new things and could use the words the knights had taught us. We all got to hold some of the weapons and they were really heavy. Some of the weapons were taller than us! 

We also celebrated PJ day and brought in our favourite stories to share. We read with our friends and talked about why we liked our favourite book and listened to some of them at story time. We had hot chocolate and listened to some of the adults favourite books.

We have had so much fun this week learning about the story of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. We were really lucky to receive a video message from the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. He told us he will be coming to Wombwell to look for Robin Hood and asked us to put up his wanted poster.

We decided that we wanted to help Robin Hood instead so we wrote some wanted posters for the Sheriff of Nottingham! 

In the role play area we built King Richard's castle and have been acting as the characters to make up our own stories. In maths we have been counting money to give to the poor that the Sheriff stole from.

In our Woodland area we have been exploring different natural materials and reading books about the animals and environment.

This week we have been continuing to learn about Robin Hood and Castles.

We have been threading beads onto numbered wands for Cinderella's Fairy Godmother to use. We have played some maths games by rolling dice to reach the end of the castle trail and in the creative area have used different colours to paint some characters for the Sheriff of Nottingham's dungeon. We made some sign posts for Sherwood forest and have stuck them around the classroom. We decided to try and trick the Sheriff and his men by sticking the sign posts pointing in the wring direction. 

Friar Tuck, Sir Noah and Guy of Gisborne sent us a video message this week and we were lucky enough to see Robin Hood safe and sound in the background, even though the Sheriff was after him!

We had lots of fun on number day and have been learning to complete colour by numbers using addition to make sure the colours we use are correct.