It was lovely to see everyone after the half term break, ready to learn!

This week in English we started reading “Kipper’s Toybox” – our words of the week were “wriggle” and “squeak!”. We explored our very own Kipper’s toybox, which has a snake, a rabbit and even a “sock thing”. We counted the objects which went in the book and thought about why “sock thing” went missing… meeting some rather cheeky mice! We shared lots of different books this week, including Noah’s "Mini Monsters Can I Play?", and the children joined in with Room on the Broom.

In Phonics we started learning our first phoneme - s. We blended words including sun and sock and had fun writing the grapheme in glitter! This week we sang Humpty Dumpty, the children enjoyed pretending to be the horsemen coming to help Humpty when they had a big fall.

In Maths we learnt about sorting objects into groups, following rules. At the start of the week we sorted a variety of objects into groups by looking at their properties. The children sorted new objects into groups using their own rules. Sophie suggested we could sort the puppets into one group “because they are soft” and put the other toys together “as they are hard”. Hayden suggested we could sort the toys into “cars and bricks, and everything else”. The children have enjoyed sorting things into new groups in provision.

In RE we started exploring a new question - Why do Christians perform Nativity plays at Christmas? We read the Nativity story and the children discussed who they thought the important people were. Theo thought that “Mary and Joseph were the most important as they were His parents”, Daisy added “it could be the angels as they bring light” and Sophie thought “Baby Jesus because he was born”. We are looking forward to learning more about the Nativity this term!

In Learning Means the World we started a new topic - Let’s Play! - we will be looking at toys and games. This week we explored our favourite toys and why they are our favourite ones. Jacob said "my T-rex because it is red" and Jaxon added his favourite toy was a "big dino that I got for my birthday!". If your child would like to bring in a picture of their favourite toy to show the class, we would love to see it! In Spa Bear circle time we even tried to match favourite toys to the teachers, which the children were very good at. We also enjoyed learning about Bonfire night, creating our own firework pictures on black paper. We have had a great first week back with all the children showing excellent listening - Spa Bear has been very impressed!