Welcome back and Happy New Year!

 Welcome to the first blog post of the Spring Term! Christmas already feels like a distant memory, but we hope that you all had a happy and restful Christmas break. We would also like to thank you all for your generous gifts and good wishes; your support is very welcome and means a lot to us.

We've began the new term with a new topic - Dinosaurs! This has been received very excitedly amongst the children, with some being quite expert on the subject already! Our WOW word of the week has been 'prehistoric' and so to help the children understand what this means, some of the children have completed a timeline activity to show that this means 'before our history', which is a difficult concept to grasp. We have also had fun in art, making paper plate dinosaurs, which have then been printed using bubble wrap to represent scaly skin. I'm sure you will agree they look most effective.  The children have also used shapes to recreate dinosaurs. In RE, the children had to think about the qualities needed to be a super hero. We then discussed, having read Snail and the Whale, how we all have super powers which we used to help each other. 

In Literacy the children have been applying their phonic knowledge and using Fred Talk to compose simple sentences about what they did during the holidays. In maths, the children have been finding one more than a given number.

This week the children started in their new Read, Write Inc. groups and they have coped brilliantly with the changes following the assessments that took place at the end of last term. We are hoping that this half term will see many more children moving on from Fred Talk to blending, as this will mean that they can move up to a 'ditty' Group, which means they will be able to then bring home a reading book. Obviously, anything you can do to help support your child at home would be most appreciated and certainly be beneficial.

In the Secret Garden this week, the theme of dinosaurs carried on as the children went on a dinosaur hunt! Once they found one, they organised them against different criteria to sort them. Different dinosaurs were identified by looking at their different features. We then counted the dinosaurs and discovered we’d found the most number of triceratops and the least number of T-Rex’s. 

Congratulations to everyone who received a learning award this week.

For Show and Tell next week, we would like the children to bring in something old. This is loosely linked to our dinosaur topic, as they existed a long time ago!

​Have a lovely weekend everyone!