Penguin Huddle

Friday 24 January 2025

In our literacy lessons this week, we enjoyed reading Penguin Huddle by Ross Montgomery.  In the story, the penguins huddled together during an icy storm but it was so cold that they got stuck together and couldn’t break free!

Our word of the week is: huddle.  Ask your child to tell you what it means. Can they use it in a sentence?  

Here is some of our super writing from this week.

We also watched a short clip from an episode of BBC Frozen planet  to find out more about where penguins live. We located the UK and the Antarctic on a map and found their locations on a globe.

How is the Antarctic environment different to the United Kingdom?  After watching the clip, we looked at some photographs of the Antarctic and compared them to the United Kingdom to find similarities and differences.

Focus Artist: Yayoi Kusama

This week, children loved exploring the art of Yayoi Kusama. We found out about her life and why her artwork incorporates so many polka dots!  On Tuesday afternoon,  we visited a special ‘pop-up’ Art Gallery in the Hub.

When looking at the artwork, we used sentence stems to talk about our opinions.

I like it because…

I don’t like it because…

I love this one because it’s like a domino.  Cillian

This one is my favourite because the dots look like they are sparkling. Hugo

This one has lots of bright balls. I like it. Jazmin

After looking at the gallery, we took inspiration from some of the pictures to create our own Yayoi Kusama inspired artwork. We’ve also been exploring colour mixing to find out what happens when you mix two of the primary colours (red, blue and yellow) together.

Maths -composition

This week, children  consolidated their understanding of the composition of 5 using the familiar rhyme ‘5 Little Speckled Frogs‘.   By singing the rhyme and moving the frogs during each verse, children investigated part–part–whole relations, e.g. seeing that 5 can be made of 3 and 2.

There are five frogs on the log but when one frog jumps into the pool, we can see that there are four frogs on the log and one in the pool.  5 can be made of 4 and 1.  When another frog jumps into the pool, there are 3 frogs on the log and 2 in the pool. 5 can be made of 3 and 2. 

We also used our fingers to show this, first holding up 5 fingers and then putting one down each time.

Poetry Picnic

Our poetry sessions this week have been a little different as we learnt and recited a traditional nursery rhyme.

The children used gestures and expression to recite ‘Jack and Jill’.

Watch it here. .

Phonics

Spring 1 week 3  has focused on the digraphs ur, ow, oi and the trigraph ear.

We’ve learnt the tricky words; my, by, all.    Tricky words are words that should be read by sight.

Help at home:

Each week, we’d like to give you an idea of a game you could play at home to make reading even more exciting.

This week’s game is: Tricky Word Splat