Plants - The Enormous Turnip and this weeks learning

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'.