Henri’s Scissors
We’ve been reading Henri’s Scissors, by Jeanette Winter. (This is a YouTube link. Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip).
The story is a biographical children’s book, about the artist Henri Matisse. We found out about his life and looked at some of his artwork.
Our word of the week was artist. We had lots of discussions about types of art, introducing new vocabulary such as sculptor/sculpture and collaging.
We’ve been artists ourselves by “painting with scissors”, just like Matisse!
Art talk
We’ve been using our language and communication skills to respond to different examples of artwork by Matisse. We thought about which parts we liked and disliked and tried to answer some questions about the artwork.
- Why do you think the artist painted this?
- Which is your favourite and why?
I like it because I can see green diamonds. Delilah
I like the sprinkles. Mila
It looks like a rainbow. Jazmin
I can see a green dinosaur footprint. Cillian
Phonics
This week, we learnt some more new phonemes: ck, e, u and r. Here’s a video on how to pronounce these sounds using pure sounds.
We’ve also learnt the tricky word; I. Tricky words are words that should be read by sight. We start by identifying which part of the word is ‘tricky’. ‘I’ is tricky because we need to say /igh/ and not /i/.
Poetry Picnic
Children continue to enjoy listening to poems during snack time. We listen to a new poem each week and recite it every day. By saying the poem out loud, we can focus on the sounds and rhythm of each word or line. We talk to the children about how this can help us become better readers.
We also talk about how poems sometimes have rhyming words and about how poems can have fast or slow rhythms.
Follow the link to watch Reception recite this week’s poem,Leaves are falling.
Maths; counting principles
In Maths, we’ve been using our subitising skills to identify patterns to 4. We’ve practised spotting changes and identifying the changes we can see. Are there more, fewer or the same? We even tried to listen to how many sounds we could hear – without counting!
Children investigated different ways of making 4, using multilink cubes. This was inspired by our introduction to Numberblock 4.
Help at home – autumn leaves and conkers.
If you go on a walk this weekend, we’d really appreciate donations of dry leaves to help us with an art project next week. We also need some conkers to use in our maths learning – see how many you can find! Thank you for your support.