Pets

Hi and welcome to ladybird's blog.

This week we have been very busy yet again.
We have been learning about pets. We have been finding out which animals are best as pets, which pets the children in ladybird class own, what a pet needs to be happy and healthy and if we don't have pets which pets we would like to own.

We also have a class pet! He is a stuffed cuddly toy fish called Freddy. He will be visiting lots of your homes and keeping a diary while he is there. Please feel free to take pictures of Freddie in your home and stick them in the diary to help you to show us what you have been doing. He has already visited Miss Brind's house and had a lovely time.

 

 

In Reception Phonics this week we have been hard working as usual. We have learnt the sounds, ear, air, er and ur and also looked at the tricky words:

 

are

they

you

all

 

Please practise these sounds and tricky words over half term and see if you can spot them in your child's reading book with your child.

 

In Year One Phonics we have started our work on Phase 5. We have been looking at words with double consonants at the start and at the end of the word.

The children are really becoming confident in using ll, ss, ff, and ck at the end of words. We have also re-visited some of the cvcc and ccvc words we looked at when we were reading during Phase 4.

In Numeracy this week we have been counting in 2's. The children are getting very good at identifying which numbers they need to use. We have also used number lines and hundred squares to cover or block the numbers to see the pattern.

Have a go on this website and use the hundred square to 'splat' the numbers in the 2 times table. If your child finds this easy then move onto counting in 5's. What patterns can you see?

Hundred Square

We have also been using a pictogram in class to find out which is the most popular pet in our class.

Which pet do you think is the most popular in our homes?

 

Numeracy this week has also seen us learning about using a number line to work out a takeaway number sentence and jumping to the numbers that we need.

Here are a few of the other things that we have been learning this week?

 Klaudia is working really hard on her formation of letters.

 

Rodrigo is enjoying using the bikes.

Marlon, Connor, Caleb and Cameron worked as a team to count in twos on a number square.

They used cubes to cover the numbers and see the pattern that was forming.

 

Megan has had a super attitude to her work this week.

 

 

In PE this week the children carried out the last of their apparatus work this half term and had a think about all the things that they had been asked to do and all the things that they had to explore.

 

Today is the last day of term, we hope that you have a wonderful half term holiday and look forward to seeing everybody on Monday 24th February.

 

Ladybirds

xx

Hundred Square

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

Merry Christmas Everybody

Hello Ladybird parents.
What a Festive period it has been. We have been busy at school over the last couple of weeks celebrating Christmas. We have learnt lots of songs to sing in our Christmas play and also to share with the other classes at the church. We have performed our Christmas play to our Mummies and Daddies and we really did do a good job. Miss Brind was very proud of us. 

We have made our festive Christmas cards and calendars, Had so much fun at our Christmas party and even had a class present for Father Christmas. We have shared cards, read Christmas stories and enjoyed ourselves ready to celebrate Christmas next week. We have also had a pantomime visit our class, with a fun story and lots of jokes to make us laugh.

Here are some pictures from this week's party:

 Father Christmas came to visit us with a huge

sack of presents for Ladybird class.

 We loved opening the presents from father Christmas.

 

 Father Christmas told us all about his sleigh and his reindeer.

 

 Father Christmas waved us 'Goodbye'.

We can't wait until Christmas Eve.

 

 Maya helped open some of the presents.

 

 We are so lucky to have all of these presents.

 

 Having fun at the Christmas Party.

Yummy yum yum. Party food is very tasty.

 

 

 

We are all looking forward to next week. We hope everybody has a lovely holiday and we will see you in January.

 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Winter!

Has it been a week already?
What a busy week we have had.

This week we have been learning about winter. We have read winter stories, learnt about animals that sleep during the winter (we have learnt the word hibernation) and we have talked about the weather this time of year.
The children are now confident in choosing clothes to go out to play and know that some clothes aren't correct for this type of year.

"You wouldn't wear your swimming costume in this weather" (Lily)
We have also looked at snowy weather (which luckily we don't have yet) and have been using words to describe the weather.

We have watched Raymond Briggs' 'The Snowman'. We were all very good at guessing what would happen at the end of the story, although we were quite sad that the Snowman wasn't there to see him in the morning.

In Reception Phonics this week we have learnt 4 new sounds. We have learnt b, h, f and l.
We have also learnt some tricky words. These words have letters in them that you cannot sound out easily. e.g. I, go, the, to.
Have a go this weekend to see if you can spot any of these tricky words out and about or even in your house. How many times did you find the word 'the'?

In year one Phonics we have been looking at the sound air. We read words with air in them and also wrote them on our whiteboards.
This week Miss Brind has taught us by giving us a choice. We have to listen to the word that we are going to be using and choose either 'ai' or 'oi'. We were so good at this task this week. Miss Brind has said that we can do it often to see if we can  hear the difference between sounds and not just being able to write one sound

Our Christmas play rehearsals have started and we are learning lots of new songs. Yesterday your child brought home a slip of paper to tell you what your child will need to wear for the Christmas play. Please make sure your child's costume is in a named carrier bag and is on your child's peg by Friday 6th December.

We hope that you have a great weekend and we'll see you on Monday. Please come into school on Monday morning to see your child's celebration/magical moments book.

Ladybirds

xxx