Term 3
Term 3- Traditional Tales
We hope you had a wonderful Christmas break! Miss Holder 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: '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! We will also be cooking our very own healthy vegetable soup and icing gingerbread men. Lots of cooking and tasting activities this term!
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 practising phonics/reading at home. 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 labels and simple captions too, using the sounds that we know.
Take a look at our medium term plan for more information about what we will be learning this term.
We peeled and chopped lots of different vegetables to create our own vegetable soup. It was delicious!
We have really enjoyed investigating the ice in our outdoor area this term. We found some fantastic shapes, where the water had frozen in different containers.
We have been giving our fingers a work out this term, learning lots of new playdough skills.
We made collage candles in RE to celebrate Candlemas.
in RE this term our key question is 'What and why do people celebrate?' We began by thinking about birthday celebrations; how we prepare and celebrate for them. We designed our own invitations which were beautiful! We then moved on to celebrations in church. We have learnt lots of new vocabulary for things that are used in church for different celebrations, such as font, Holy Water, pew, alter. We learnt that a group of people who go to church to celebrate is called a congregation.
Look at all of our wonderful phonics learning this term! We have learnt lots of digraphs and trigraphs this term and are learning to blend and segment words with these sounds in them.
We read the traditional tale 'The Great Race' by Dawn Casey. We learnt about Chinese New Year- how people prepare for it and what they do to celebrate. We explored Mrs O's box of Chinese treasures and in busy time, we had a go at writing numbers 0-10 in Mandarin and dressed up in traditional Chinese clothing. Our home corner was also decorated and we had a go at using chopsticks too!
We have been learning how to form capital letters in English.
In English, we have been working on sequencing captions based on our work around traditional tales.
In maths we sang our "Five Little Men in a Flying Saucer' song to practice finding 'one less'. We learnt the subtraction mathematical symbol and then worked with a partner to have a go at recorded number sentences.
We have been exploring making numbers within 10 using ten frames. We talked about what we could see e.g. "I can see one whole row of 5 and 2 more. That makes 7." Or "My ten frame is full, that means I have 10."
Our 'Project Hook' for next term was a visit from Jaws and Claws. We were all extremely brave! We handled and stroked a snake, bullfrog, bearded dragon, skink, cockroaches and a giant African snail.
