Term 3- Traditional Tales

We hope you had a wonderful Christmas break! Mrs Cooper and I would like to wish you a very happy and healthy new year! We are now beginning term 3 and our topic for this term is 'traditional tales'. 

We will be exploring lots of well-known traditional tales such as 'The Three Little Pigs' and 'Jack and the Beanstalk' as well as learning three new traditional tales entitled 'The Gigantic Turnip' by Aleksei Tolstoy,  'No Dinner' by Jessica Souhami and 'The Great Race' (the story of the Chinese zodiac) by Dawn Casey. We will be learning about Chinese New Year, so are looking forward to making dragons and tasting some Chinese food. Yum! This term we will also be cooking our very own vegetable soup and baking gingerbread men. 

This term in maths, in our number work, we will be comparing numbers, looking at the composition of numbers 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, beginning to combine two amounts and making pairs. In our spatial reasoning and measure work, we will be comparing mass, length and height and doing some more work around time. 

In phonics, we will begin our phase 3 sounds. There will be lots of new digraphs and trigraphs to learn this term and new tricky words too. As always, we will inform you of the sounds we have learnt each week in the newsletter. Any additional practice with  these at home would be really beneficial as it is starting to get quite tricky now! Please do ask, if you need any support with phonics/reading strategies at home. Please also refer to the handouts given at the beginning of the year and during the phonics parent workshop to help you to form the 'pure' sounds when working with your child and also to help with letter formation and grapheme recognition. We will learn a specific rhyme to help us remember each phoneme/ grapheme, so it is really helpful to use these at home too. In English we will begin to read and sequence captions and also write simple captions too. 

Take a look at our medium term plan (below) for more information about what we will be learning this term.

Our class texts this term...

Our Trip to Church

In RE this term, we have been thinking all about celebrations. We discussed what we might see and use at a celebration and created a list of all of the different types of celebrations we could think of. Many of us shared experiences of our own special celebrations, such as family weddings, baptisms and birthday parties. 

We thought about how and why some of these celebrations happen at church and wrote a list of questions of things we would like to find out! The following week, we were very lucky to visit St Paul's Church and had the opportunity to ask Fr. Jamie our questions. He showed us where people celebrate their wedding, Holy Communion and Baptisms within the church and what is used during these special celebrations. The children behaved absolutely beautifully and listened so carefully. We learnt some new vocabulary such as 'chalice', 'pew', 'alter', 'organ' and Fr. Jamie showed us his special robes and explained which time of year he wears each colour robe.

Cultural Week

During cultural week, we learnt all about Chinese new year and Ghana. We read The Ghanaian Goldilocks by Tamara Pizzoli and compared it to the traditional tale of 'Goldilocks and The Three Bears'. We learnt that Ghana is in the continent of Africa, where the climate is very hot. We researched which animals live there, what the flag looks like and the types of food which are eaten and enjoyed. We created our own flags and coloured some tribal print patterns which are traditionally used on clothing. 

During our learning about Chinese new year, we learnt that homes are cleaned before the new year, to sweep away the bad luck and decorations are hung around the home. The colour red is seen as a very lucky colour, so most clothing and decorations are red in colour. We learnt that children are given special red envelopes with a good luck message on them. Inside, they contain coins to wish them wealth and good luck for the year ahead. We were very lucky children in Castle class as Mrs O bought us all a lucky red envelope to take home! Inside were three special Chinese coins which are meant to bring good luck. We had an afternoon of food tasting, where we used chopsticks to eat noodles, rice and prawn crackers. Some of us also tried some soy sauce! Yum! We were also given a special fortune cookie to take home. During our child initiated time (busy time), we have had super fun in our role play area which has been transformed into a Chinese restaurant! We have also made paper fans, paper chain dragons (and performed a dragon dance in groups), practised writing numbers 0-10 in Mandarin and used chopsticks to pick up pom poms, to work out our fingers! We read the story of the Chinese zodiac- The Great Race by Dawn Casey. We ordered the animals in the order that they won the race from 1-12, and made animal stick puppets to help us re-tell the story. We found out which animal we are from the Chinese zodiac. We are all either dogs or roosters! It has been such an exciting week!

Changes to our provision during 'Cultural Week'...

The Big Bad Wolf!

Take a look at our wonderful writing! We decided what the Big Bad Wolf might say to the Three Little Pigs and had a go at writing it in a speech bubble independently. We are doing so well at applying our phonics learning now, when we segment to spell words. Well done Castle Class!

We also made 'WANTED' posters to try and track down that BIG BAD wolf! Look at our amazing writing! 

Magic Beans!

Jack left us some 'magic' beans! We independently planted them in jars and gave them a little water. We decided to leave them on the windowsill where they will receive the most sunlight and warmth. We are hoping that we might return to some giant bean stalks after half term! 

Busy Time!

Take a look at some photos of our 'busy time' (child initiated learning) this term. We have particularly enjoyed constructing models and houses with a range of materials...