2526 Acorn and Holly week beginning 19th January

The children have settled so well back into school life these past few weeks and it has been lovely to catch up and hear all of their news. We have loved getting straight on with our new topic learning all about 'What Lies Beneath' and exploring under the sea. 

For the first week and a half our focus story was Immi, a story about a little girl who lives in a very cold place in an igloo and fishes all sorts of interesting things from her fishing hole which she uses to decorate her igloo. Our theatre area of the classroom, of course, became an igloo which the children all helped to decorate with some beautiful and very carefully painted artwork. The children also became expert igloo builders and worked on their fine motor skills by using tweezers and sugar cubes to do this as well as the Reception children writing messages in bottles to throw into the ‘fishing pool’! Happily, all of this learning about cold weather combined with the little bit of snow and lots of ice that we enjoyed exploring outside.

In maths, the Reception children have been learning about 4 sided shapes; naming and noticing the differences between squares and rectangles. They have now moved on to looking at numbers to 5 (and beyond in some cases), including understanding zero. Last week the children all contributed to a class ‘zero’ book where they made pages showing ‘zero’ and ‘not zero’ using pictures. The Acorn children have been counting and representing numbers to 3, making sure they are careful and accurate and all of the children have enjoyed the track games we have played to work on these skills.

This week we have been reading the Oliver Jeffers story ‘Lost and Found’. The children have shown great imagination during our drawing club lessons when thinking about different ways the boy and the penguin could travel across the sea, as well as wondering what sea creatures they might come across on their journey. We have been super story tellers, and the children have worked on retelling the story, with the older children also encouraged to cut out and sequence pictures to do this. Everyone has also had the opportunity to explore the different emotions the boy and the penguin feel through the story through the medium of playdough! This week has also been full of boat designing and building and many of the children have made some brilliant creations inspired by some photos of different types of boats we have been looking at. Do have a look at our photos for some of these!