Pets and this week learning!

 What an amazing and busy first week back we have had! Our theme this week was 'pets'. We started the week listening carefully to the story ‘Tabby McTat’ by Julia Donaldson. We explored what animals we could own as pets such as cats, dogs, rabbits, lizard, tortoise, horse, guinea pig, hamster, snake, fish and chickens! We discussed what we need to do to care for a pet and concluded that pets need a loving home, a space safe to live, water and appropriate food – we spoke about how certain foods can make animals poorly.

A group of us worked with Mrs Stevens to make play-dough. We carefully measured out the ingredients and practised our turn-taking!

In provision, children have had the opportunity to draw a picture about a pet they have at home and we have been writing sentences about our pets! If we don’t have a pet at home, we have been writing about what pet we would like. Children have been completing graphs to show what their friends favourite pet is out of a dog, cat, rabbit, fish and bird! Can your child tell you what their friends favourite pet was? Some Reception children worked as a team to order the Numicon pieces 1-10 - discussing what one more than their current number was - it was so lovely to see the children choosing to practise what we have been covering in our Maths lessons. We have been practising our carefully colouring and cutting to make our own split pin pets and we have been using the 'How to Draw' sheets to develop our drawing skills!

In Literacy, Year 1’s text driver for this half-term is “Where the Wild Things Are”. We started the week listening carefully to the story and answering questions about it. Children have moved onto the ‘acquire’ stage of our unit where we are learning about adding the suffix ‘ed’ to given words and using these words in sentences.

In Maths, Reception children have focused on ordering numbers to 8 and using the stem sentence ‘X is more than___”. We have used the 5 and a bit structure to represent 8 as 5 and 3 more and we have used the NumberBlocks episode ‘Peekaboo’ to help us reason about which numbers are ‘more than’ and ‘less than’ others. Year 1 children have explored partitioning numbers 6 to 10 using the part-whole model representations and have begun work on systematically partitioning numbers 6 to 10.
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In Science, we have begun to describe materials using key property vocabulary - hard/soft, stretchy/stiff, shiny/dull, rough/smooth, bendy/rigid, waterproof/not waterproof, absorbent/not absorbent and opaque/transparent.