The final week of our Dinosaur topic!

The children have absolutely loved our Dinosaurs topic and I am sure they are sad it is coming to an end, as they have been so engaged and become very knowledgeable on the subject... we now have many fantastic palaeontologists!

In Literacy this week, we have been reading lots of facts about Dinosaurs and then recording some sentences about what we have found out. The children have been working hard to write with more Independence and are now using their phonic knowledge and Fred Talk much more to do this, which is great! The children have also been very busy producing dinosaurs using their initials, making dinosaur pictures of their skeletons, finding out which dinosaurs were herbivores, carnivores or omnivores and looking closely at dinosaurs to identify whether they walked on two or four legs. We have even conducted  a science experiment linked to the story Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs, which was great fun, and involved trying to retrieve a 'dinosaur egg' from a bucketful of water without touching anything. 

The children are all continuing to work hard at letter formation and presentation. They have mostly mastered the 'perfect pencil grip' and posture and there are pleasing signs of improvement. Keep up the good work!

In maths this week, the children have been working practically to use the vocabulary involved in adding and subtracting by making equal sets of dinosaurs and using the language of 'more' and 'fewer'. 

With regards to our continued efforts to get the children reading, we will be adding some RWI Green words to their RWI wallets from next week (Thursday). These words contain all of the sounds the children have learnt and which are also phonetically plausible. A support guide is in the process of being written which will also be sent home to you, so that you will have lots of ideas for using them in a fun way with your child to further enhance their learning. In addition, on the Rushmere Hall website under 'Curriculum', then 'Literacy' and then 'Reading', you will find files of all of the RWI sounds. This has been produced so that, should you so wish, you can open this up at home and the children can scroll through the pages recounting the sounds as they go. Please be aware though, that most of the children have only learnt Set 1 sounds,  so don't panic if they become a little stuck on the other sets! We also plan to send home some Red words. These are tricky words that are not phonetically plausible and so just need to be learnt e.g. 'I' and 'my'; again, please practice these with your children. Obviously if you have any questions regarding RWI, please contact your child's class teacher. 

Congratulations to everyone that received a well done or celebrated a birthday this week. It sounds like the children have been experiencing some lovely birthday parties! 

For your information, next week in class we will be celebrating Chinese New Year. As the colour red is so symbolic of this celebration, we are asking the children to bring in something red for Show and Tell.

​Have a lovely weekend everyone.