Happy Valentine's Day!

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

I think you're canny
Wey aye, pet, it's true!

So, we had a think about what happens on February 14th and what Valentine's Day is. Some responses were - 'It's when you tell someone you love them', 'You give people cards and something nice' and 'You could draw a picture for someone you love'.

We then talked about someone we love, why we love them and what we could do to show them we love them. Children decided that saying something kind, asking them to play with you, giving them a hug or simply telling them you love them are all good ideas. 

We stuck tissue paper to both sides of two heart shapes and said whose name we wanted written on the heart - Mam, Dad, brothers, sisters, cousins, grandparents. Each child then said why they love that person. We are so blessed with people who love us - people who make delicious food for us, give amazing hugs, make us laugh, give us Saturday morning cuddles in bed, play with us and help us! The hearts then joined together to form a hanging decoration.

Jungle Explorers!

We made binoculars out of toilet and kitchen roll tubes so we could explore the jungle! We recalled all the different animals we have learnt about over the last few weeks and played a game with a talking partner where we took it in turns to describe an animal for our partner to guess.

Then we used our fantastic writing skills from phonics to write some clues for our chosen animal.

Peek-a-boo!

Baby Harry's Day In School!

Mrs Hutchinson was in school today with her beautiful baby!

It was lovely to see her and baby Harry! Mr Noble kept him entertained while Mrs Hutchinson caught up on the latest news in school!

We Love Phonics!

Reception are getting better all the time with their sounds and can now say them at speed each session. We have been focussing the last few weeks on listening for sounds in words and blending sounds together to help us with our reading.

We have played the 'Please, Mr Crocodile' game, only being allowed to cross the river if we have the object sounded out by 'Mr Croc'! You could play a variation of this game at home by finding objects with simple sounds (s-o-ck, c-u-p, p-e-n, f-e-l-t, b-r-u-sh) and sounding them out. (You'll find yourself walking round the house sounding out all the objects you see in no time, and be amazed at how many objects you can find for this simple game!)

We have also been writing the simple sounds on picture sound cards, practising our letter formation too. We did this in a phonics session, and then many children chose to continue this activity in the writing corner during planning time.

Finally, we've been enjoying playing some of those online phonics games that were sent out in the phonics pack to parents. For this one, we have to say the sounds in the word and blend them together to know which picture to click on. This has been really popular in planning time, and children are becoming more confident with blending sounds, helping each other too. Soon, we'll be able to recognise words by sight as we see them more often!

Story Maps

We know the sequence of Monkey Puzzle so well now, we can even draw story maps of the events in the story! We can then tell the story using our story map to help us!

 

You can do this for any story - Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, The Smartest Giant in Town, even your own story!

It helps with sequencing events in a story, and encourages fluency in being able to verbalise a story, leading to greater fluency for thinking and writing stories.

Why don't you try one yourself?

Animal Pictograms

Reception have done a pictogram to find out which jungle animal is our favourite. We had five animals to choose from. We cut out our chosen picture and added it to the right place on the pictogram.

We were then able to answer lots of questions easily by looking at our chart. Can you see:

Which jungle animal was chosen the most?

Which animal was only chosen 3 times?

How many people chose the tiger and the monkey altogether?

How many more times was the crocodile chosen than the monkey?

Mrs Howe chose the tiger as her favourite. Which animal would you have chosen and why?

You could make your own pictogram for favourite colour power-ranger, favourite food, colour of cars you see out of your window, anything!

A Pandemonium of Parrots

We now have a 'company' or 'pandemonium' of parrots in our jungle corner! (No, I didn't know that was the collective noun for a group of parrots either!)

They really are a funny bunch, and any resemblance to the penguin in Wallace and Gromit with a rubber glove on his head is purely accidental! All made by us!

First, choose which colour of card you would like and draw round your foot onto it. (This is harder than it looks!) This will be the body.

Then, do some colourful hand-painting (about 7 should be plenty). Remember to roll your sleeves up, wear an apron and not touch anything until you are clean again!

Note: Some children will thoroughly enjoy getting stuck in!

 Finally, when everything is dry and cut out, assemble your 'feathers' to make a 'pretty polly'! Add googly eyes and a beak to finish.

Don't you think they look fantastic?!