In English we read "Harry’s House" – our words of the week were "journey" and "comfort". We looked at the journey which Harry, the main character, took to get to his Grandad’s house in the countryside. We talked about which animals are found on a farm and where they live, we even had a go at drawing them! Daisy drew “a lamb, and these are his horns”, Rosie added, “some chickens” and Noah added “a horse!”. Later in the week we wrote a letter back to Harry’s Grandad about Ripon and our school. We included key details such as “We have a kitchen area in the classroom – a big one”, “We can play with sand which is soft on our hands outside”, and “We have bananas after English during snack!”. This week we shared books on the Gruffalo’s Child, We’re going on a bear hunt, and some crazy underpants..! Thank you to everyone for sharing their enthusiasm for books, it is lovely to see!

In Phonics, we learnt the phoneme ‘b’ for bird and beaver. Our nursery rhyme was “Down at the station”. We really enjoyed making the sounds of trains, as well as playing instruments. On this week’s visit with Bertha the Bus, we saw a bear!

This week in maths we explored heavy, light and the same, looking in detail at scales and when objects are heavier and lighter. We enjoyed exploring weighing different objects, and different amounts of the same object. We understood that the greater the amount of something we weighed, the heavier it would be, and the scale would tip down; when objects weighed less, the scale would tip up. We weighed items around the classroom, such as our large dice – which weighs the same as 10 bricks!

In RE we continued learning about Salvation and discussed how Christians celebrate Easter. We talked about the importance of Easter Sunday to Christians, and thought about how Easter is celebrated.  Sophie said she celebrates “with pink flowers”, Elijah added that he “finds the eggs, and eat them!” and Theo explained that he likes to “decorate eggs and do an egg scavenger hunt”.  

This week in Learning Means the World we explored unusual houses. We had a letter from Spa Bear’s Mum in the Curiosity Cube this week – she is looking to move house and wanted our input on what sort of house to choose! Robyn thought she should move to a lighthouse “because it shines light and is white and blue”, Rosie thought she should move to the “farm because she would have a lot of space”, Jaxon instead suggested “a castle because it is massive!”, and Hayden thought a log cabin “because the witch is not there and it is empty”. We have also started making our shoebox rooms; we have been busy decorating them, developing colour mixing skills, choosing materials and developing our fine motor skills – it will look amazing when they all fit together! It has been lovely to get outside into the sunny weather in provision this week. We have been creating mini bug hotels, making a habitat for dinosaurs, and even doing some cycling! We also had a session led by North Yorkshire Cricket this week. Spa Bear was very impressed with how well everyone joined in and tried something new! We tried a new warm-up game called volcanoes and craters, which developed our teamwork skills, and then learnt bat and ball skills of batting from a tee and catching and placing down balls, improving our coordination.