We enjoyed the book ‘Marmaduke the Very Different Dragon’ by Rachel Valentine, and talked about how our differences make us special, and how important it is to celebrate difference. This story inspired some wonderful drawings – each child drew a picture of their dragon, decided on a name and then wrote about what made each one special. Reception came up with some really special skills for their dragons, and it was wonderful to see how each dragon was so very different!
In phonics sessions, we have been learning the sounds /p/, /i/, /n/, and using these letters (along with /s/, /a/, /t/) to blend and segment simple CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words. All the class have enjoyed their reading this week and we have been pleased with the positive way they have approached this – we worked on pointing to each word as it is read, recognising character names in the text, looking for known letter sounds and, of course, we have encouraged plenty of talk about the story and illustrations. In mathematics, we have been looking at number formation of numbers 3 and 4, the position of numbers on a number line and lots and lots of counting. We also made a class block graph showing the colours of our eyes; we were amazed that 13 children in the class have brown eyes!
The children have also been looking at repeated patterns, using different resources to embed understanding in a fun way – we even painted our hands to create repeated pattern handprints.