Chinese new year!

Welcome to this week's ladybird blog.


We hope that you have had a good week. The weather has certainly been colder and we have all been wrapping up warm.


This week we have been learning about Chinese New Year. Today is just the start of the celebrations in the Chinese calendar for new year. This year, as we have found out is the year of the horse.
The horse is the 7th animal in the Chinese new year. This week we have read the story about 12 animals that had a race. The animals that are celebrated are in order of where they came in the race. The rat being the first and the most clever animal in the race, holding onto the ox's back when the animals swam across the river in their race.
This week we have made Chinese dragons for a special Chinese dance, coloured Chinese pictures, investigated Chinese noodles using tweezers and looked at Chinese symbols.
Yesterday there was a very special delivery of Chinese food for us to taste. We had the chance to eat: Egg fried rice, chips, prawn toast, onion rings, vegetable spring rolls, meat rolls, meat wantons.
We will also have the chance to eat Chinese prawn crackers at our celebrations this afternoon.
We have written on Chinese new year cards and made special envelopes.


In PE this week we have carried on with our work on apparatus. We added 3 new pieces of apparatus onto the benches and used them to investigate moving, jumping and landing. We are always safe when we use the apparatus and make sure we land on the landing zones using bended knees. Miss Brind asked us this week to have a think about what we are doing with our arms when we are about to jump and what happens to our arms when we land. We had all sorts of different ideas. We used our arms to balance and our arms helped us when we landed. As long as we didn't land directly on our hands.


In Numeracy this week we used the Chinese New Year race to help us think about 'ordinal numbers'. These are numbers that are shown in order. For example.......when we are lining up to go to lunch we always have somebody who is 1st in line, somebody who is 2nd and somebody who is 3rd. We have practised using these words in our own races at playtime and even Miss Brind, Mrs Whittaker and Miss Gowing had a race. Can you guess who came 1st, 2nd and 3rd?
Try using these words at home. If there are 4 of you in your family see if your child can order which order you are all up in the morning, or order who is ready at the door with their shoes and coat on.


In Reception Phonics this week we have carried on with our Phase 3 sounds: We have looked at ai, ee, igh and oa


Thank you so much to all the parents who came to our phonics lesson on Monday. As you can see we are really getting on very well with our phonics and we are really impressing Miss Brind with all that we can remember and use in Phonics.


In Year One Phonics this week we have looked at Phase 4 tricky words. We have also had a go at writing them. We have finished off our Phase 4 work by recapping the sound 'ure' and using it in words such as cure, pure, sure, treasure, and manure.
We will be starting Phase 5 next week. This is where we have now learnt all the Phase 3 and 4 sounds and will now start using 'alternative spellings' For example we can use 'ai' in words but this could also change to 'ay' in other words. We will also be learning about words that end in 'e'. These words are called split digraphs and often change the sound of the vowel in the word. An example of this is have.
We are doing very well to be using Phase 5, so don't forget to read with your child every week to help them to practise these sounds.


Here are a few of the other things we have been doing this week:

Klaudia and Eysan made a castle, remembering their castle trip from last week.



 

Kaydee-Louise, Klaudia, Alexandria and Caleb made a bridge for the Island and helped Mrs Whittaker order numbers 10-20

 

We performed our own dragon dance

 We tasted prawn crackers

Riley made a flying house out of lego

 

Have a super weekend and we will see you on Monday, Ready for another busy week.

 

Ladybirds

 

 

 

Jungle Animals!

Wow, what a fun filled week.
We have been looking at lots of animals in the jungle and have had lots of fun learning about them.
No matter how scary we thought they might be we have spent the week using drama to go into the jungle and become the animal. We have used freeze frames (human photographs) and hot seating a jungle expert to find out more about the animals.
Along with all of this we have coloured and made these animals on the creative table and even made jungle animal sock puppets. We have made sure that we know that these animals are different from the farm animals we looked at last week.


In PE this week we carried on with our work on apparatus and worked on our body shapes as we were on the benches and then thought about our body shapes as we landed. We used the landing zones to land safely and made sure that we bent our knees.


In Reception phonics this week we have been looking at Phase 3 tricky words: me, be, we, he and she. We also went on a tricky word hunt around the room, we were very good at finding them and then reading them out. We have also looked at the sounds sh, ch, th, and ng. We have read words using these sounds and had a go at listening to what they sound like when they are in a word. On Thursday we used all of these sounds and played a game to see if we could spot which sound fitted which word.


In Year One Phonics this week we have been looking at cvcc, ccvc and ccvcc words. We are now confident in reading them and writing them, along with spotting the sounds that are difficult to hear when we are writing them.


In Numeracy this week we have been looking at 1 more and 1 less. We helped Miss Brind along the jungle path and made sure that she was able to reach the end by giving her numbers that were one more. We discovered that we could use the word 'more' and 'less' with other numbers in Numeracy and not just by using 1 more, but could say what number was more than another number.


For example:
10 is more than 3
3 is more than 2
7 is more than 5


We can do the same for less
For example:
5 is less than 6
3 is less than 10
5 is less than 7


Have a go at using the words more and less at home:
Can you find a number that is more than 2?
Can you find a number that is less than 10?




Here are a few of the other things we have done this week:

 We had a visitor from a jungle expert.

 

 Kaydee-Louise made lots of jungle animals

 

 Beth found the letters to make her best friend 'Sonny's' name

 Eysan found the letters to make her name

 

 Cameron found the letters to make his name

 

 Ivan made the word bear

 

 Jade found the letters to make her name

 



 Angus wrote 'run'

 

Caleb found the letters for his name

 

We hope that you have a fantastic weekend and look forward to seeing you on Monday for our RECEPTION phase 3 phonics lesson on Monday at 9oclock.

 

Ladybirds

Nine ducks Nine!

Hello Ladybird Parents, after a very busy week, we have quickly reached Friday again.

 

This week we have carried out lots of work around our story 'nine ducks nine'.

We have learnt lots about where ducks live and used our water tray as our duck pond.

This has helped us lots with our work on Floating and Sinking and we have looked at lots of things in our class to see what would happen when we put them in our water tray.

We are getting really good at 'predicting' what might happen and using lots of vocabulary to help us.

We have put a sponge, a lolly stick, a piece of white paper, a piece of crepe paper a piece of cotton wool and a feather.

This has helped us to make a display to help us with our learning and we have put photos on to help us to remember what we have done.

With your child see which of their bath toys float and which ones sink.

 

In Reception Phonics this week we have learnt the sounds x, y , z, zz and qu.

We have also learnt the tricky word he.

 

In Year One Phonics this week we have been recapping on our phase 4 tricky words and have carried on writing our cvcc and ccvc words. The children have become very confident in listening out for every sound not just the initial and end sound.

 

In PE this week we have been using the benches. We have thinking about how we can travel and how we can land when we come to the end of the bench, on the landing zone.

Here are some pictures from this week:

 Beth shows April a superb landing on the landing zone

 

 Cameron chose to walk sideways along the bench.

 

 Lily hopped along the bench.

 

 Maya carefully along the bench.

 

 The children loved investigating in the water tray

using the words 'floating and sinking'

 

 Mrs Reeder enjoed a story with Sayaki, Saksha and Eysan.

 

 The children all had their own lollystick to put in the water.

They could then decide whether it would float or sink.

 

What do you think will happen to the Lollystick?

 

On Thursday we enjoyed a whole day talking about castles, ready for the Year One trip to Norwich Castle on Friday. We looked at different types of castles, named some of the parts of a castle, looked inside a castle and talked about the different shapes and different places they were built. The children especially liked the castles built with a moat, river or beach around them.

 

Have a lovely weekend and we will see you on Monday morning.



Happy new year!

Hi Ladybird parents and welcome back to a new term and a New Year! 2014 looks to be exciting and hardworking with lots of new challenges to face and lots of learning to do.


We have started of our Spring term with our topic of animals and this week we are looking at 'Farm animals'.
The children have looked at lots of farm animals and have recognised them with confidence. Ladybirds were very talented when recognising baby farm animals and knowing which baby belonged to which parent. The children also have a very good understanding of why we have farm animals in Norfolk and what they can give to us. The children used the main vocabulary of 'eggs, pork, beef, chicken, lamb' along with naming things that they eat that have the following meats in them. We really felt very hungry after we had finished talking about all that food.


In Reception Phonics this week we have learnt the sounds j,v and w. As you are aware we have started our Phase 3 phonic booklets now, so have a look at which sounds your child already knows.
In Year 1 Phonics this week we have been looking at cvcc words. These words are ones that trick us when we are writing. We are super-fantastic at reading these words and make sure we always blend each letter e.g. w-e-n-t, but when we are writing these words, the children tend to only here w-e-t and write it in this way. Practise writing the following words with your child. This can be done using bathtime/fridge letters, writing in sand, writing in the air or with any crayons/felts/chalks or pens.
-help
-tent
-just
-belt
-lamp


In PE this week we have focused on shapes that we can make using our bodies. We used the words 'flat, spikey, wide, tall, narrow, small and short. Use these words with your child to describe things in your home or ask your child to make these shapes using their bodies.
Here are some more things you can try at home:


Sing old McDonald had a farm
Take a trip to a farm or see if you can spot any farm animals when you are in the car.
Take a trip to the library and see if you can find any books about farms.

We are having difficulties uploading our pictures from this week. If you would like to see what we have been doing please feel free to come and see our celebration and magical moments books on Monday morning.


A quick reminder to Year 1 parents: if you have not yet returned your permission slip and £3 for the castle trip next Friday 17th January then please return them as soon as possible.


Have a wonderful weekend and we will see you on Monday morning.


Ladybirds