For our project outcome for magical, mythical creatures we made a new creature with our parents. We had to think of a name and a special power for our new creature.

Today in Year R we had to work in teams.

The children were given a problem:

“Someone is trying to steal Occamy’s eggs so Thunderbird is going to help her move them to a safe place. But Thunderbird can’t carry them so we have to help him. Work as a team to find a way to transport the eggs safely. Watch out! If Thunderbird accidentally drops them, they need to be protected”.

The children designed then built a container that could hold an egg while Thunderbird moved them. We then tested each container to see if it was able to be held by Thunderbird in his claws and whether the egg was protected.

Here are some of the containers that were created:

It was great fun and we learnt how to work as a team, sharing ideas and listening to others.

This week in Year R we started looking at fantastic beasts. We had a letter from Newt Scamander each day asking us to help him in looking after some of his creatures.

When of the activities the children completed was making their own creatures out of chosen media and combining different materials. We had to think what they would be called.

Here are a few of the creations:

Next week we are going to be continuing to look at these creatures, focusing in on Occamy and Thunderbird, as they have a challenge ahead!

This week in phonics we are going to be introducing the phoneme /f/ and the digraph /ff.

We will be looking and blending the following words:

fit

fan

fun

fog

Later in the week we will introduce the digraph /ff/ understanding there needs to be two letters to write the digraph. We will look at the following words:

puff

stuff

huff

We will be introducing the tricky word ‘she’ with the understanding ‘she; refers to a girl. We will put ‘she’ into sentences and read the word within sentences.

If you have any questions about the teaching of phonics please speak to your child’s class teacher.

Year R team

This week in phonics we have been looking at the phoneme /l/ and the digraph /ll/.

We first introduced /l/, looking at words that begin and contain the phoneme. Words we introduced are:

leg

lot

limp

After we introduced the digraph /ll/ explaining it made the same sound but mostly came at the end of words, although there are a few words that are exceptions:

doll

fell

hill

lolly

We also introduced the tricky word ‘he’, understanding that the word ‘he’ refers to a boy.

If you have any questions about phonics or reading, please speak to your child’s classe teacher.

Thank you from the Year R team

This week in phonics we have introduced the phonemes /ss/ and /b/.

For /ss/ we have talked about it being a digraph, where two letters make one sound. We show this through drawing a line under the letters.

We have spent time looking at the difference between /b/ and /d/.

We have been learning in sounds when reading and writing words such as:

mess

hiss

grass

bug

bed

big

This week we have introduced the tricky word ‘into’ and put this word into lots of sentences.

Next week we will be sending out a new tricky word bookmark with the next set of words on that we will be teaching. These will be called phase 3 tricky words so look out for it.

If you have any questions about phonics or reading, please speak to your child’s class teacher.

Thank you. Year R team.

This week in phonics we introduced the children to the phonemes /r/ and /h/.

Some of the words we segmented and blended with the children include:

run

rot

ran

rip

hen

hop

hit

had

This week we also introduced the tricky word to. We put this word into lots of sentences and talked about how we use the word ‘to’ when talking about somewhere we may go, distinguishing it from the number two.

If you have any questions about phonics or reading please speak to your child’s class teacher.

Thank you from the Year R team

On Wednesday 15th January, Abbie from zoolab came to visit Year R and she brought with her lots of exciting animals. Some were small, some were furry, some were scaly and some were slimy!

All the children listened really well to the information about the animals and asked some really good questions about the animals, including what they ate, how they moved, where they lived and how they survived.

The children were able to use the terms herbivore, carnivore and omnivore correctly too. Abbie was very impressed.

Here are some photos of the animals we saw. We tried to get a picture of the cockroach but he moved too quickly!

Now we are learning about their habitats and how they survive.

Nearly all the children either held or touched the animals, and were so gentle when they did this.

Welcome back to school and hope you had a lovely Christmas break.

This week in phonics we have been looking at the sound /e/ and /u/. We talked to the children about these two sounds being vowels and how they are more common within words.

We played at being word detectives this week, searching for words in the classroom then practicing segmenting the sounds, blending the sounds and saying the words.

Some of the words we worked on were:

egg, ten, men, pet, pen, deck

mud, dug, mug, duck, rug

We also introduced our next tricky word – I. We learnt how to write it making sure it had a hat on top and feet on the bottom!

If you have any questions about phonics or reading in class, please speak to your child’s class teacher.

Today all the teachers in Year R received an email from Mr Ross telling them they needed to go to the field straight away as there was something unusual!

What could it be? Had Mr Ross lost his badge again?

So, Year R went to the field in their wellie boots and found this scene:

On further investigation, we discovered there were bones in this area. This got us all thinking:

Who were the bones from? How did they get here?

Time for some investigation work!

There were eight bones.

Back in the classrooms we started to think about who the bones belonged to. We drew pictures, built models and even used the loose parts to create the creature we though it could be.

Mrs Benson is going to send the photos to the Natural History Museum to see if they know who the bones belong to… watch this space!