The Snail and the Whale

Friday 05 July 2024

The Snail and The Whale

We’ve been reading The Snail and The Whale, another book by one of our favourite authors, Julia Donaldson

We’ve been retelling the story in our own words and writing special blackboard messages, just like the snail trail messages in the story!

The book had some fantastic adventurous words to describe landscapes and actions. Our word of the week was humongous. We discussed the meaning of lots of other words too.

Can your child tell you what each of these words mean? They could use the images to remind them.

Maths

This week, we’ve re-visited the composition of 5 in various ways.

 

 

Transition

On Wednesday, the Reception children had a wonderful visit to their new Year 1 classroom. It was a delightful experience for the children as they met their new teacher and explored their future learning environment.

The children were excited and engaged, participating in fun activities to make them feel welcome and at ease. This visit was a positive step in helping the children transition smoothly into Year 1. They left with big smiles and lots of enthusiasm!

The dancing raisin experiment

Phonics

Summer 2 week 5 has focused on:

root word ending in: –er, –est

longer words

In provision, we’ve been reading words ending in –ed and sorting them by the sounds that –ed makes:

‘t’ final sound: jumped, helped, screeched etc.

‘id’ final sound: boasted, painted, printed etc.

 

Help at home; Sentence Substitution Throughout the school year, we’ve suggested lots of practical ways to explore phonics at home with easily made resources and games. There are also some great quality online phonics games. Sentence substitution is a great way to practise both reading and comprehension. The goal is to replace one word in the sentence, whilst ensuring that the sentence still makes sense. This is a free to access game on ‘Phonics Bloom’ Click here to play at home!

Poetry Picnic

Each week we will be learning a new poem. We will recite this poem each 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.

This week’s poem is Sliced Bread

 

The children enjoyed exploring synonyms for the word nice and came up with many alternatives, such as delightful and delicious. This sparked a lot of interest in changing and adapting various parts of the poem. Check out some of their new poems!

Nell Bank

On Friday, we set of on our trip to Nell Bank. We began by listening to a story about Pete who liked to be TIDY but maybe a little bit too much.

Tidy: Amazon.co.uk: Gravett, Emily: 9781447273981: Books

We worked together safely to clear up a big mess! During this activity, we explored ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle, and discussed what would happen to litter if it was left.

Afterwards, the children had the opportunity to go on a mini-beast hunt to help Pete find lots of worms. Following this, it was time to help Pete make a new home in the woods. One of their favourite parts of the day (outside of  lunch, of course) was the water play area.