It’s great to be back together in the classroom and see everybody again. We’ve had a lovely but tiring week.

We’ve been getting used to being back in the classroom and remembering our routines.  We’ve been talking lots about good listening skills and have been doing lots of activities to encourage us to problem solve and work together.

In literacy this week we’ve been looking at spelling patterns and continuing with our rhyme work – writing some real and nonsense words. We’re focusing on using our sounds to help us with our spelling and also that there some irregular words that we need to try and remember.

We’ve also been revisiting some of our double sounds.  We looked at the ‘sh’ sound, reading Julia Donaldson’s Sharing a Shell and used our plasticine to make our own friends sharing a shell. We’ve also been reading and writing lots of ‘ar’ words, focusing on a shark theme. We read lots of shark stories, learned lots of shark facts and even have a shark in our classroom! We  started an underwater shark scene and did some great black pen shark pictures which we labelled to help with our descriptive writing. We’ve also been doing lots of reading and practising key words.

In numeracy we’re continuing with our work on subtraction as well as looking at numbers to 100.  We’re spending a lot of time discussing the language of numeracy and the different ways of wording things, for example how ‘one less than’,  ‘the number before’ and ‘subtract one’ all mean the same thing! This gets trickier when working with bigger numbers.

This morning Mrs Collins told us about the RSPB Wild Challenge which we’re taking part in for our outdoor learning. This coincided with us being very kindly donated a bird table by local trademan Mr Lee Darker. We’re setting up bird hides in the classroom so we can see which birds we can spot – we’ve already spied a curious chaffinch!