Woodland Animals - This Weeks' Learning

​This week we have continued our learning on ‘Amazing Animals’, this week we have focused on woodland creatures. We started the week learning the names of different woodland animals; fox, mole, otter, hare, badger, squirrel, hedgehog, beaver and owl. We also learnt the name of the previous animals’ habitats; den, burrow, holt, form, sett, drey, nest, lodge, warren and tree. Team EO have been learning and practising the Makaton signs for; badger, deer, fox, hedgehog, mole, mouse, owl, rat, squirrel and snake. Can your child remember the Makaton signs? Here is the link to the video if you want to practise at home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d01s4zgCq7g. Our book this week was “The Gruffalo” and we enjoyed joining in with the familiar and repeated refrains! 

Our funky finger activity this week was threading! We had to use our 'Peter Pointer' and 'Tommy Thumb' to carefully thread the wool through the holes! We have been practising our cutting skills to sort sea creatures and woodland animals into their correct habitats and we have been making our very own models of the Gruffalo - they have looked fantastic! This week in our writing area we have been drawing our own terrible creatures and using our Fred Fingers to say what makes them so terrible!

In Literacy, Year 1 children have unjumbled the spellings of the days of the week which Miss Overton had got all mixed up! We have also recapped previous learning on the prefix ‘un’ – we know by adding this we change a word into its opposite meaning. We have been writing our sentences about we have done on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, ensuring we spell them correctly and we have been using the prefix ‘un’ in our sentences as well as the conjunction ‘and’.

​In Maths, Reception children have developed their confidence in counting strategies, including counting on from different starting numbers. We have also considered strategies for counting larger numbers of objects, including those that cannot be moved. Year 1 children have been representing 'first, then, now' stories with addition and subtraction equations, we have also made our own ‘first, then, now’ stories and have written addition and subtraction equations to match. Finally, we have worked out the missing part of an addition story and equation if the other two parts are known. 

​In Science, we carried out an investigation to see which material is the strongest to build a bridge with. We used cardboard tubes to hold our materials up and we put wooden blocks on the materials to see which was the strongest. The material which held the most wooden blocks was the strongest. The materials used were; foil, paper, plastic and cotton. We used our talk partners to make our predictions and we found out that the strongest material was the plastic as it held 13 wooden blocks. The paper was the second strongest as it held 11 wooden blocks. The weakest was the cotton as it held 0 wooden blocks. The foil held 11 wooden blocks.