Our theme this week was life cycles and we have focused on the question ‘How does it grow and change?’. We started the week listening carefully to ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ by Eric Carle. Some of our provision enhancements included; ordering the life cycle pictures of different animals, creating our own food diaries and dominoes to make a domino rally in our funky fingers tray! Our Reception children have also enjoyed playing the Caterpillar track game with their friends - they have practised turn-taking, recognising numbers, counting and comparing more/fewer!

​Reception children have been working hard with their morning work to write ‘I can see’ sentences about their picture stimulus – they are really developing their confidence to write simple sentences ensuring they are using their Fred Fingers to sound out words.
In Literacy, Year 1 children have worked hard to write questions about different picture stimuli and then about their chosen jobs! They have produced some fabulous questions and know that a question is punctuated with a question mark.

​In Maths, Reception children have explored ways in which 10 can be composed of 2 parts and have represented the composition of to using dice frames and finger patterns.

​Year 1 children have learnt to explain the different between consecutive numbers, to explain what happens when 2 is added to or subtracted from odd and even numbers, to explain what the difference is between consecutive odd and even numbers and to explain what happens when zero is added to or subtracted from a number.

In Science, we have learnt to identify and name the UK national flowers (Rose, Daffodil, Shamrock and Thistle) and we have matched them to the correct country on a map of the UK.

In Computing, Year 1’s continued to familiarise themselves with word processors and how they can interact with the computer using a keyboard. The children worked hard to enter text into the computer, use the letter, number and space keys and learnt to use the backspace to remove text.

​In PE, we have begun our ‘Athletics’ unit. This week we looked at moving at varying speeds. Our warm up activity this week was an activity called Mr Men we had to listen to the commands and move accordingly. We were then put in teams and had to move from one end of the area to the other end and back before giving the next child a 'high-5’ and we had to listen to our travel instructions which were walk, jog and sprint.

We have been learning and practising Makaton linked to our planting songs “The Planting Song” and “In My Little Garden”. We have learnt to sign ‘working’, ‘farm’, ‘garden’, ‘flower’, ‘grass’, ‘sun’, ‘rain’ and ‘fruit’.

Team EO love being in our outdoor area!

This afternoon we have been learning how to hula hoop - it is rather tricky to keep it going! We have been practising sitting and balancing on the space hoppers whilst bouncing across the grass! Some of us have been learning to balance and ride in a straight line on the balance bikes and some of us have been learning to turn and move in between obstacles and other children and some of us have been learning to pick up speed and move faster. 
Team EO enjoy going on the  climbing frame - this helps us to improve our balance, coordination, and agility.

Our learning focus this week has been on planting and growing. Our book of the week was ‘The Enormous Turnip’.

​The children started the week sowing a sunflower seed. We then looked at what plants need to live and decided that the best place to put them would be on the windowsill so that they can soak up the sunlight – we are very excited to watch them grow. The Reception children have all been having a go at writing instructions on how to grow a sunflower.

​On Monday, Reception children completed a “Draw with Rob” and produced some beautiful baby birds! On Wednesday, we looked at the work of Claude Monet focusing on his garden landscape paintings. Children have had the opportunity to paint a garden picture inspired by Monet. Our funky finger activity of the week was a mosaic drill set – we had to use our funky fingers to use the plastic nuts and bolts, screwdrivers, screws, wrenches to make our own patterns and pictures!

​In Literacy, Year 1’s have started a new piece of work on questions. Our text driver for this unit of work is “An Engineer Like Me”. Our text is questions, audience is Miss Overton and our purpose is to generate questions to find out about an aspirational job. This week we have learnt that a question is a type of sentence that asks something and ends with a question mark not a full stop! We have learnt question words and identified these in a text, we have identified whether a sentence is a question or not and we have been filling in the missing punctuation after deciding whether the sentence is asking something or telling us something.

​In Maths, Reception have been consolidating their use of finger patterns to represent the composition of 5. We have been using our fingers to represent the composition of 5 and identifying a missing part of 5. We worked with a friend and 5 counters - our friend hid one part in a closed hand whilst showing using one part in an open hand, we had to say how many was in the closed hand and put that in our stem sentence, for example "3 and 2 make 5". We have been identifying that 6 can be composed of 5 and 1, and 7 can be composed of 5 and 2 and representing numbers 6 – 9 on their fingers as ‘5 and a bit’.

In Maths, ​Year 1’s have continued to work on finding pairs of numbers to 10 – looking at addition and subtraction and adding and subtracting 1 from any number.

Team EO staff were super impressed and proud at how independent children were at getting changed for PE for the first time. We started by doing two laps of our school field to warm up and then the children enjoyed practising a short relay race and even though we found it tricky we kept on trying!

Year 1’s have begun a new computing unit on ‘Digital Writing’. They started by discussing all of the places that we can create and write text and how a word processor is similar to a blank piece of paper. The children were then given a template of a keyboard and Miss Stuart asked us “what do you notice about the keyboard?” – they spoke about how the letters are not in alphabetical order and that they are all capitals. The children used their keyboard to find and colour the letters in their names. Then we moved onto using the word processor to write the letters of the alphabet, our first name and surname and a friend’s name!

In Science, we have all been introduced the unit of “Plants – How do plants grow?” and we cannot wait to start our learning on this unit next week!
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On Welly Walk, we had a lovely time spotting signs of Spring and creating observational drawings. At the end of Welly Walk Team EO love to share a story in the shelter, this week we had our first read of this weeks core book 'Jack and the Jelly Beanstalk'.

This week we learnt a new poem with actions called "A Little Seed". 
We spoke about the meaning of the word 'sow' and are working hard to remember its meaning - to plant a seed in the soil.

Here we are performing our poem!

We are looking forward to welcoming our Marvellous Monkeys back on Monday to begin our Summer 1 learning adventure. We hope you all had a lovely holiday and are ready for an exciting and busy half-term ahead! 

Our new exciting theme for learning is "Watch it Grow!". We will begin by exploring plants and what they needs to grow - we will be planting and growing our own sunflower and we will look in more detail at plants over the course of the half-term as this is our science unit.  We will move onto looking at life-cycles and how animals and plants grow and change. We will be taking a week to celebrate the Kings Coronation and have an exciting parent story and craft session coming up. We will also be learning about minibeasts and staying healthy!

In Science we will learn about the names of common plants and trees and learn to identify them by their leaves. We will learn about the terms ‘evergreen’ and ‘deciduous’ and how deciduous plants fit into the change of the seasons.  This unit includes an investigation about growing healthy plants. 

Our core book for this half-term is "Jack and the Jelly Beanstalk".