This half term Rainbows have really enjoyed having their parents come to school every Tuesday to read with them.

Children are able to choose their favourite stories or find new stories they love and share these with their parent or grandparent.

It has been lovely to see families sharing stories and to hear the conversations about these books.

We hope to continue this "magical story time" as it has been so much fun!

We learnt Spanish numbers to 10 this week!

We have been singing along to Spanish number songs to help us, and have been holding our fingers up as we say each number. We can count to 10!

Please ask us at home and we will sing our song to you!

We read several versions of Little Red Riding Hood this week and compared how they were different.

This week we practised Fred Talk to help us read and write. We decided to invite the wolf to a picnic and matched labels to the correct food to help teach the wolf what each item was (as he was only used to eating Grandma's!) Some of us had very tricky words with Set 1 special friends, and some of us had longer words that we needed to break down to read.

Next we decided to make a shopping list of all the food we would need to buy. We practised Fred Talk to segment the sounds and then wrote them down.

Some of us designed a trap for the wolf. We designed it and then did Fred Talk and wrote the labels for the plan.

Here is some of our fantastic writing below!

We have been working hard to develop our fine motor skills this week when learning about Little Red Riding Hood.

We have been practising holding scissors to snip and cut, and to cut around objects. We cut out clothes for the wolf so he could disguise himself. We also cut out food for grandma and added it to a picnic basket.

We decided as Grandma was feeling poorly that we would make her some flowers to cheer her up. We carefully followed pictorial instructions to fold tissue paper into a concertina, wind a pipe cleaner around it and carefully pull the tissue paper apart to make the petals.

We coloured characters from the story being careful to stay within the lines and to eliminate white spaces between the colour.

We also followed instructions to make paper picnic baskets by cutting round a template, making holes in the paper and adding a split pin to keep it together. All of our hard work is in the gallery below.
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This week we have learnt that dinner time is a very important part of the day! Not just because we get to eat yummy and healthy food though!

We have been learning to set the table, and have placed our own knife, fork and spoon out and poured our own drink. We had a "dinner party" with our name cards placed on the table and were able to talk to friends and strengthen friendships with children who we may not usually sit with during dinnertime. We had lots of fun together!

We practised using a knife and fork to cut up our dinner and are making progress with this! Some of us even helped our friends cut up their dinner if they were finding it tricky. We are looking forward to getting into a routine of doing this everyday, and are excited to show our parents our new skills at home!

We have also been learning about table manners and can say what we should and shouldn't do at meal times. 

We have been making the most of the winter weather by exploring ice!

We noticed that the water in our outdoor area had frozen and turned into ice! We had so much fun exploring what it felt like. Here are some of the comments;

"Its cold," "Its slippy," "Water is ice," "Its icy," "You put water on it to melt it," "The water freezes with ice on top," "Its hard and you can cut your hand."

What a busy week!!!
This week our stories have been The Three Billy Goats Gruff and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We have used puppets to act out the stories and re-enacted the story of the Billy goats outside using our little bridge. We have talked about character behaviour and character appearance, using words to describe the Troll and Goldilocks. It was also the Chinese new year celebration this weekend and so during the week we have done some research about the celebration and talked about red as a lucky colour, how Chinese is a language that it written with symbols and how dragon dances  are about bringing luck. We made dragons and lanterns in provision and had a go at writing Chinese numbers and letters using black paint and fine paintbrushes. Next week we will continue to do a little more research about China using google earth and looking at some more images of the festivities and notable Chinese landmarks.  We are continuing with our observations of decay and growth and noted changes to our food bags and hyacinths that had happened over the weekend. We also had a whole class team activity of using a range of construction materials to build bridges across our pretend river. In Maths we have been focussing on the composition of number 5 and learning pairs of numbers to make 5 and counting beyond 10.

This week we were very happy to hear that a lady in a Care Home close to our school would be celebrating her 102nd birthday. What a special day!

The Rainbows were keen to help her day be really extra special and made her some beautiful cards! Mrs Longden delivered our cards after school.

We received a lovely photo from the care home of the lady looking at her cards with a huge smile on her face! The Rainbows were so happy we made her smile and were able to make her day that extra bit special.

We know that being kind makes people feel happy and safe, and also makes our world a lovely place to live in.

This week we have been listening to medieval musical instruments. We listened to some instruments we had never heard of before including the psaltery, double flute, clavichord and hurdy-gurdy.

Nearly everyone said they had never seen instruments like this or heard music that sounded like this before.

Everyone listened really carefully and enjoyed talking about what they could hear and what they thought of the music. It was interesting to see the progress in comments from a few weeks ago, especially as the Rainbows are beginning to hear individual instruments within a piece of music, and to hear some of the questions they were asking. Here are some of the comments that the Rainbows shared;

"It sounds like ballet music," "It sounds like a fairy flying about fast," "It sounds like church," (Clavichord) "It sounds like a horn," "It sounds like a whistle," "It's squeaky and sounds like a singing fairy," "It sounds lovely like Christmas," "I can hear a drum," "It's wonderful," "Do you put your mouth on and music comes out the pipes at the bottom?"

This week we have had a visit from some gingerbread men! They appeared in our classroom and were hidden everywhere! We discussed why we think they arrived, and we decided that they were hiding from the sly fox and had jumped in through the window when it was open. We were worried that there were other gingerbread men hiding in school so we made some wanted posters. We used "Fred Talk" to write simple sentences for them to come to our room so we could keep them safe. The next day when we came to school we found more! They had read our posters and come to safety.

During provision time some of us wrote some wanted posters describing what the gingerbread men looked like, or tasted like!

We wanted to let Mrs Watson know what had been happening and together we spoke about what we could tell her. We wrote her a class email to fill her in on all the fun we had been having!