An exciting beginning to our week with the theatre coming to Bushey and Oxhey on Tuesday. The children were very excited to watch the story of ‘The Wizard of Oz’. On Monday we looked at the characters and setting of the story. The children really enjoyed watching and listening to the story. It was very exciting when the Professor kept jumping in and out of the screen! They all enjoyed drawing their favourite characters and parts of the story. Today we did some Wizard of Oz inspired Cosmic Yoga. 

As our beans continue to grow we have decided to think about how tall they might get. We looked at the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. We have been reading lots of different versions of the book. We have had lots of discussions about how the main story and characters don’t change but sometimes the smaller details such as the inclusion of the coins, harp and hen. 

We then decided this would be a good hook for some writing. Some of the children have begun to do some simple sentence writing around the story. As a class we practised writing the sentences ‘Jack went up the beanstalk.’ and The giant says fee fi fo fum.’ 

Writing sentences requires a lot of skills from the children. They need to be able to think of and remember their sentence, count how many words there are and segment each word. As an extra challenge the children are also trying to remember to use capital letters at the start of their sentences and for names, finger spaces in between each word (not each sound) and a full stop at the end so that we know that sentence is finished. As if all of that wasn’t enough we also have to think about how we form our letters correctly. Wow! It really is a lot to remember which is why we are so impressed with all of the amazing writing work that the children are using.

In Maths we have been continuing to think about teen numbers and really using the language of ten and some more. We have been continuing to use five and ten frames to show this and support using the very important language. We have had a lot of discussions about the numbers looking like a 1 and something e.g a 1 and a 3 for 13 but how we know it is not a 1 but a 10 and 3 more.  

We also have been enjoying ‘visiting’ Numicon City this week. The children were trying to fit the Numicon pieces into the different skyscrapers and were really thinking about how many different ways they could do it. Today the city was celebrating an ‘odd number day’ so all the even numbers had disappeared, this added an extra challenge for the children. 

Very exciting news for our caterpillars today. Three of our butterflies have come out of their chrysalides (cocoons), two of which slipped out during out yoga this afternoon!. We have all been very excited watching the wings go from white and develop their colour throughout today!

See you all for our next week for one more week before half-term