What a busy, final week we have had in Orange Class! 

Our sounds this week in Phonics were h, b, and f . We have continued practising our new and old sounds making sure we are pronouncing them correctly and we have continued to think about words that use these different sounds. We have also been practicing our oral blending skills by saying the sounds separately and then blending them to make whole words. We have been practising writing our sounds on whiteboards, in the air, on big paper and in our special coloured rice. We have all been doing fantastic learning and the children have learnt so many sounds this half term! We have also introduced two red words, these are ‘the’ and ‘I’. These are words that we can’t sound out making them a little bit more tricky to learn but as always the children have amazed me by how quickly they picked them up.

This week we have been continuing our focus on the number ‘4’. We have explored how this number is one more than 3 and double 2. Throughout the week we have been creating our number 4 poster collecting items that represents this number. We used Numicon to think of all the many ways that it can make the number 4. As well as how we could make 4p as there isn’t a 4p coin. We then began looking at the number ‘5’ we used the Numberblocks episodes 7 and 9 to support our initial introduction into this number. These can be found on Cbeebies and on Youtube if you would like to watch these at home with your child. 

This week we have finished our first piece of writing work using the story of The Little Red Hen. We have been very impressed with all of the children’s story maps and the writing that they have completed using their phonics knowledge. 

We have also been continuing our celebration of the Harvest Festival. We were able to watch the amazing assembly created by both schools, where all the children at the Infant School sang harvest songs and some of the Bushey Manor children talked to us about why the harvest is so important. Additionally, we have had an amazing amount of Harvest boxes brought in by all the families at the school. Thank-you to everyone who donated, I’m sure Watford Food Bank will be very grateful for all of the donations!!

We have been looking at our bodies this week and all the many parts of it. We enjoyed drawing around one of the children in the class and labelling the parts of the body. Some of the children even chose to recreate this during our active learning. This also led us to read the Funnybones book, the children really enjoyed listening to all the things that the skeletons got up to during the night. Some of the children also coloured, cut and stuck the characters from the Funnybones book and we put these up around the classroom. We’ve had a very creative week!!

Continuing with the topic of our bodies, the children went on a body part hunt outside. They had to search all around the outside area trying to find all of the images and then tick them off. Everyone had a lot of fun looking for the pictures. It was even more fun when they kept blowing away. The children have also had the opportunity to make an x-ray. Using the white or yellow pencils they drew around their hand and arm and then used the art straws to create the bones for their fingers, wrist and arm.

Today we have enjoyed our first school fancy dress up day! As all the children looked so amazing in their Autumn and Halloween clothes we decided to do a small parade around our classroom.

Earlier this week we put a pumpkin on the art table and asked the children to paint a picture of it. They all looked super! Then today we decided to use hammers to put plastic nails into a pumpkin the children had to really use their muscles! We then added some wool so that the children could weave and wrap it around all the nails trying to make sure it didn’t get too tangled. 

I hope everyone has a lovely relaxing week off, I know I’m going to do a lot of sleeping!!

See you after Half-term!!!!!