Term 3

Term 3- Traditional Tales

We hope you had a wonderful Christmas break! Miss Holder, Mrs Williams 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 icing gingerbread men.

This term in maths 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 and positional language.

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. We did print out lots of resources/ handouts for our last phonics workshop. If you would like copies, please let us know, or please do attend the next phonics workshop (details to follow in due course). 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.

Medium Term Plan Year R Term 3.pdf

We were snow explorers this week! We caught snowflakes on black card! We counted them to see who could catch the most and then observed them through a magnifying glass and watched them melt. We also explored the ice and had a go at smashing it!

We read the story 'The GIgantic Turnip' then explored a basket of vegetables. We prepared the vegetables by scooping, peeling and chopping, then cooked them to make our own vegetable soup! It was very yummy!

Some examples of our wonderful writing all about the Big Bad Wolf!

We made houses for the Three Little Pigs.

We worked in teams to see who could build the strongest and most creative bridge for the Three Billy Goats Gruff.

We planted bulbs ready for spring time.

In maths we have been thinking about addition and subtraction within five. We made five little speckled frogs and five little men in a flying saucer to help us sing our number rhymes and practice taking one away/ finding one less.

In music we have learnt the definition for the words 'tempo', 'dynamics' and 'pitch'. We have practised using instruments to play in time to the beat of a song and have also had a go adjusting how we play the instrument according to the change of tempo and dynamics in our fairy tale songs.

Jaws and Claws!

Today we had some very special visitors in Castle Class! In term four we are learning all about minibeasts and in term five we are learning about Africa, so this was our 'topic hook' to get us really excited about our learning over the next two terms! We were all very brave and touched or held a snake, cockroaches, tortoises, giant millipedes, a bull frog named 'Stinky Pete', a bearded dragon and a giant African land snail.

Chinese New Year

We have learnt all about Chinese New Year this term. We explored some Chinese artefacts and traditional clothing. We made paper chain dragons, paper fans and had a go at writing numbers in Mandarin! We also created a huge dragon head which we used to perform our very own dragon dance and parade around the school.