This half term our theme is 'Growing and life cycles'. Over the past two weeks we have been reading books about caterpillars: 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' and 'Little Caterpillar' as well as books about fruits: 'Handa's Surprise'.

In Maths we continue to think about different careful counting strategies, such as lining up the items that we are counting to make them easier to count. We have also been looking at AB patterns. AB patterns are repeating patterns that have two items that continue to repeat. We have been using different elements, such as colours and shapes, to represent and make these patterns.

In Phonics, we have looked at the sounds 'y' ('yellow,' 'yap' and 'yo-yo') and 'z' ('zip', 'zoo' and 'zebra'). 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. y-a-p and z-oo). 

We have been learning the makaton signs for different fruits, such as apple, orange, strawberry and banana. 

In Music, we have been thinking about the sounds that we can hear in storm and using body percussion to recreate those sounds. 

In Science we have been continuing to learn about growing and life cycles. Our caterpillars have continued on their amazing metamorphosis journey and last week they turned into chrysalises. This week we have been so excited to see them hatching out of their chrysalises and flapping their beautiful wings! Our beans and sunflowers that we planted in the Nursery garden have started also started growing and the children take great care to make sure that they are watered on a regular basis. 

In Art we have been painting our own scene from one of the books we have been reading, Handa's Surprise. We used block paints to paint the background and then stuck on characters and animals from the story.

We commemorated VE day by adding a splash of red, white and blue to our uniforms. We also coloured in Union Jack flags, made bunting and practised our fine motor skills by cutting out spitfire planes.