People who help us

This week we have welcomed another new friend into our class. Joana has been enjoying settling into our routines and has been very confident to communicate with us in English. She has enjoyed joining us for lunch each day and has had a great time exploring the park and trampoline in the farm. At the beginning of the week Joana was a little nervous around the animals but already she is confident to enter the chicken coup and the pen where the goats and sheep live. She has even had a turn riding our donkey, Perla.

This week, we have started a new topic, ‘people who help us’. We have been learning about all of the different people in our community who are there to help us in their jobs, such as teachers, rubbish collectors, firemen, lollipop ladies and doctors. We have had lots of fun creating masks of the different professionals and we are getting much better when using the hole punch to help us cut out the eyes. We worked very hard to create different people who help us and had to use lots of force when pushing the split pins into the blue tack when creating the moving arms and legs for each of the people. It was very tricky to split the pins but we all concentrated very well and were able to create a moving person. We worked fantastically as a team within the construction area when creating different buildings where people who help us work, such as a hospital, fire station, train station and a doctors’ surgery. We even created people to work in each of the areas and talked about reasons why people need to visit the hospital. 

In phonics this week, Sergi, Kai, Luke and Noa have continued to learn the ‘m’ sound. We have done lots of fun activities to help us the remember the sound and formation of the letter. We created a monkey by colouring in and cutting out the different parts of the monkey’s body. We then put the together and learnt the song ‘five little monkeys’. The children loved doing the actions and were keen to say how many monkeys were still jumping on the bed. We also had lots of fun creating our own monster, using different materials and the children created some very good hairstyles, using the feathers. When learning the word ‘mouth’, the children did a fantastic job of cutting out the different parts of the face and were able to stick the different parts in the correct place on the face. Jordi, Noa, Amrita and Joana also did a fantastic job of writing labels to show the names of the different face parts.  Finally, Jordi, Marcel and Joana enjoyed navigating their way around different mazes and they were confident to say the different pictures they could see within the maze, which started with the letter ‘m’. Jordi and Amrita have continued to learn the set 1 sounds, using the sound- picture cards.  Jordi has done a fantastic job and now knows all of the ‘set one’ sounds. He received a special certificate and he was very proud of himself. Amrita is also doing extremely well and she now only needs to be more confident when recognising and writing the letter ‘l’. This week, Joana and Marcel have joined us and are now learning the set 1 sounds, using the sound- picture cards. They both did a brilliant job recognising the single letter sounds and they enjoyed creating the corresponding pictures for some of these sounds. We will now start to work on the consonant diagraphs, using the picture cards to help us

In maths this week we have continued to learn about shapes. We had a great time using our imagination to create a monster, using the different shapes we have learnt. Each child’s monster is very unique but they all look excellent and are very scary! Marcel and Amrita were particularly confident to explain to me about the different shapes they had used to create their monsters. We also continued to learn about shapes and have begun to recognise and continue simple shape patterns. Joana and Marcel were particularly confident to repeat the patterns and they were also able to create their own colour pattern, using the shapes. All of the children worked really hard to create colour and shape patterns and I am really pleased with the confidence they are gaining when recognising and naming the different 2D shapes. To end the week, we created a new display of numbers from 0-20. Each number shows a picture of a different person who helps us. We had lots of fun climbing up the soft play ‘mountain’ to select the correct given number. All of the children were very motivated and cheered very loud for their friend when they were able to find the correct number.

In maths, this week Judit and Sara have continued to work on addition and subtraction. Sara has become extremely confident in her abilities to add and subtract two and three digit numbers. She now understands how to complete addition pyramids by ensuring that the two numbers on the bottom of the pyramid add up to the number on the top. She has been working hard to understand how to use the given numbers to fill in the gaps within an addition number sentence. However, at the moment she is finding this difficult and needs a little more practise with this concept. When completing subtraction activities, Sara has become very confident to subtract, using the ‘adding method’. She is now able to subtract from two and three digit numbers and is very aware of the mistakes she has made with her answers and is now able to correct these independently. Sara has been using the number line to help her to subtract. She has been working hard to decide which ‘jumps’ she needs to make down the line and which number number is best to land on, to help her to find the answer. However, she found this method quite difficult and needed a lot of help to understand how to use the number line. We will continue to practise this method when revisiting addition and subtraction. When completing the mental arithmetic test, Sara did a fantastic job an was able to answer almost every question correctly. She was extremely proud of herself when only getting one question out of twenty incorrect. Judit is extremely confident with addition and subtraction and has been able to work through her maths booklet very independently. She has become much more aware of how to tackle addition and subtraction word problems and she now understands the information within the problem, which she needs to select and use to allow her to work out the answer. Judit has been confident to work with two, three and four digit numbers when adding and subtracting and she is very confident to use the grid method to help her work out her answers. Judit did very well with her mental arithmetic tests but was incorrect with some answers because she misread the sign with the number sentence. Since recognising the importance of the addition or subtraction sign, Judit has been working really hard within the practice activities to ensure that she is reading the number sentences correctly to allow her to work out the correct answer.

In reading comprehension, this week, Sara has been working on the concept of ‘myths and legends’. She has really enjoyed reading the myths and legends and has been very enthusiastic to share the content of the stories by reading them aloud to us. Sara was very confident to recite the key events within each of the stories and she is becoming more confident in recognising the meaning of what is written on an inferential level. Sara has been answering questions about the texts she has read and she was very confident in explaining her answers. However, when asked to quote examples from the text, to help her further explain her answer, Sara found this difficult and continually referred back to the task to try and find examples of each instance mentioned in the questions. We will continue to work on this skill next week when completing comprehension tasks about play scripts. Judit has been working on persuasive texts and advertisements. When reading the texts, Judit was able to answer the questions about each persuasive argument but she found it difficult to identify the persuasive words and phrases, which were written within the texts. We have talked a lot about the importance of using persuasive language in an advertisement and when completing a booklet, containing lots of advertisement posters, Judit was very confident to circle the words which she thought had been used to specifically persuade people to buy the product. She was very accurate with this and she now understands how to identify these words and the importance they have within a piece of persuasive writing.