This half term our theme is 'Growing and life cycles'. Over the past two weeks we have been reading books about beanstalks: 'Jasper's beanstalk' and 'Jack and the beanstalk') as well as books about flowers: 'Planting a rainbow' and 'Little Sunflower'.

In Maths we have been thinking about careful counting strategies, such as using our finger to touch the items that we are counting to make sure that we count every item and that we keep our place when counting. 

In Phonics, we continue to learn about different phonemes (individual sounds). Over the past two weeks we have looked at the sounds 'v' (volcano, van and vet) and 'w' ('web', 'wig' and 'wave'). Each week we continue to work on our segmenting and blending skills, which help us to break down the different sounds in words and then blend them together again to remake the word (e.g. w-i-g, and v-e-t). 

We have been learning the song 'I can sing a rainbow' and have been trying very hard to learn the makaton signs for the colours in the song: red, yellow, pink, green, orange, purple and blue. 

In Art we have been exploring colour mixing and have been using our hands to mix two primary colours (red, blue and yellow) together to see what colour we make (orange, purple and green).

In Music, we have been thinking about the affect that music can have on us by listening to different types of music and thinking about how this music makes us feel (e.g. happy, sad, excited, scared). 

In Science we have been learning about growing and life cycles and have been very excited by the arrival of 10 little caterpillars in our classroom. We are patiently watching and looking after them as they go on their journey from caterpillars to butterflies. We have all been very excited to see them moving about in their homes and can't wait to see them grow even bigger, turn into chrysalises and then emerge as beautiful butterflies! We have also been busy learning about plants, including the different parts of a plant (roots, stem, leaves and flower). We have also enjoyed planting lots of different seeds including carrots, pumpkins, beans and flowers, We were very excited to plant our very own sunflower seeds and then take them home to look after. We hope they grow!