This week we enjoyed learning about Chinese New Year celebrations. We learnt that in some countries around the world the years are named after animals and that their new year celebrations are at a different time to ours. We noticed many similarities in celebration, such as gathering with friends and family, eating together and fireworks and light. We had lots of fun on the playground performing a dragon dance and re-told the story of The Great Race. We made paper lanterns and dragons and wrote numbers in Chinese using black paint. I hope you enjoyed the photographs.

In phonics we learnt two new digraphs, ai (aim, rain, tail) and ee (see, bee, feet, sheep). Flashcards for these will come home today, please ask your children to tell you the sound and show you the action. The digraphs can be difficult for the children to learn because at this point in the year they are so used to saying the individual sounds for those letters. A useful strategy when decoding a new word with a digraph sound in is to look for any partners making the new sound together first. We underline these and identify them as making the digraph sound before then starting to identify the other single letter phonemes from the beginning of the word.

In maths we have been building numbers 6, 7 and 8, deepening our understanding of composition of number and next week we will be making pairs, learning odd and even and finding doubles.

In dance we explored moving our bodies to represent different modes of transport and put these together to form a whole class choreographed dance. In music we used our voices to explore pitch, making high and low sounds.

Thank you so much for your efforts in getting the children in to school nice and early, it is much appreciated and gives them time to settle in before we begin our phonics lesson.

Thank you for your support, have a wonderful weekend,

Jo Bentley

Please do not hesitate to email me with any questions or queries: jbentley@stjohnsprimary.org