It was so lovely to see all of the children back in class on Monday morning. They have all grown over the Easter break (must have been that sunshine!) and have come back full of beans and ready for all the new learning ahead.

We have had some time to recap our previous Phonics learning this week, focussing on those tricky trigraphs (air, ear) but also practising our sentence writing skills too. There’s lots to remember so we think of a sentence first, hold it in our heads by repeating it a few times, then talk about any tricky parts in it (sounds, words, capital letters etc.) and then we have a go at writing it.

This week we have been thinking about what living things are and what they all have in common. The main thing being keeping healthy, with food, water and light. We have been talking about how we keep healthy, what foods are good for us and why we need to eat a balanced diet. We did some writing about keeping healthy and chose foods to make a healthy lunch. We made fruit kebabs in the week, choosing from strawberries, blueberries, bananas, grapes and raspberries and then we ate them as an extra snack before home time. This led us on to reading the story of Handa’s Surprise by Eileen Browne. This story is full of exotic fruits and today we explored these fruits, thinking of our own describing words and writing them down. We will continue looking at this book next week too.

Seasons and months of the year are our focus in Maths at the moment. We are thinking about what changes happen during each season, the types of weather we might have, clothes we wear, events and celebrations that happen and which months fit in to each season. We have been talking about when our birthdays are too.

To link in with our Maths, we have been trying to spot signs of Spring and we had a few activities going on to explore this learning and knowledge. Minibeasts are always popular, so a tray full of soil and some plastic bugs has opened up all sorts of conversations this week. We have got some bulbs growing in class and we explored daffodils too, painting them with watercolours once they had opened up. After finding lots of snails outside, we made our own snails using paper plates and squares of coloured paper. Then we investigated snails – did you know that the slimy part of their body is called a foot and they have thousands of tiny teeth in their mouths… interesting!

Next week will continue with most of our themes from this week but extending on to days of the week, other ways to keep healthy and more writing around the story. And we might be getting some new little visitors in our class too by the end of the week… if the post is on our side that is!

Wishing you all a lovely weekend.