This morning the school photographer visited and all the children had their individual photographs taken. The children are bringing home the information you need to order these, please look for it in their bookbags.

This week the children learnt their first digraph (two letters one sound) ‘ck’ They also learnt e, u, and r. The flashcards for these will have come home with them today. Two tricky words were also taught this week; ‘the’ and ‘to’ Also known as sight words, these are words that we cannot de-code using the sounds we know. Next week we will learn 3 more tricky words, to, go and I.

In maths we recognised, subitised and represented the numbers 1, 2 and 3. Children used different objects as well as sounds and movements to show 1, 2 and 3 and match their representations to the numeral. We used the story Goldilocks and the three bears to support our learning and some children had lots of fun setting up a tea birthday for baby bears birthday, making ‘3’ birthday cards and finding sets of 3. We also used the story ‘The Gingerbread Man’ to recognise and represent the ‘one more’ pattern. Next week we will look at one less and begin to understand composition of numbers, that all numbers are made up of smaller numbers or ‘parts’ of a number.

We continued to think about Autumn and learnt that some animals go into hibernation in the Autumn, we learnt a rhyme about hedgehogs and painted hedgehogs using forks to create their spikes. We read Room on the Broom and drew a character from the story, labelling our drawing using the sounds we know. We thought about what might happen next and shared our ideas.

We talked about kindness and sharing, and how to be a good friend. In R.E. we thought about the different groups we belong to and looked at pictures of symbols that represent different religious groups as well as photographs of the different places in which people gather together for prayer.

We had a music lesson this week, we played along to the banana rap, a piece of music that uses chant. We used our bodies, as well as instruments to find the pulse and move to the beat. Next week I would like to start our P.E. lessons, so if you have not yet done so, please do send in a P.E. kit for your child. P.E. will be first thing on a Wednesday morning. I expect the majority of our first lesson will be spent changing into our kits and changing back again, but it will be great to get started!

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