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Week Commencing 5th May 2014 - The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Phonics

This week we have learnt some more friendly letter sounds and these have been: ‘oa’ ‘oo’ (short) and ‘oo’ (long). The two ‘oo’ sounds are short and long depending on the word that they are in e.g. c-oo-k and s-p-oo-n. The children have been looking at different word with the different spelling and sounding out words. We have also been spelling out words with all these sounds using Floppy’s Phonics programme on the interactive whiteboard.

Mathematics

In Maths this week we have been doing a lot of revision activities. We have looked at 2D and 3D shapes and learning the names of all the shapes and their properties e.g. how many corners they have, sides, edges and faces. We have also been revising time and looking at the clock to read o’clock and half past times.

As part of our book of the week this week ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’, we have focussed on the days of the week and ordering them correctly and filling in our class calendar to show the correct day. We did a very hungry caterpillar maths activity which involved addition. We worked with our talk partners to take it in turns to answer a question and then to extend ourselves, we thought of our own questions to go on the back of the sheet.

We put the days of the week in order in relation to the story ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ and put the items of food alongside the days of the week as part of retelling the story.

‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ by Eric Carle

This week we have been looking at the story ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ by Eric Carle. This book also links in with the topic of minibeasts that we started last week. We did a brainstorm of ideas that we wanted to do for the ‘Very Hungry Caterpillar’ and have been very busy indeed! We got to work straight away at making our own large caterpillar, a cocoon and beautiful butterflies. These were all carefully painted by us and then hung up on display in the classroom.

The children have really been inspired with this book this week and the creativity that they have shown has been absolutely astounding. Some children chose to do things completely self-chosen such as drawing pages from the book, making their own Hungry Caterpillar books and writing their own version of the story. The Ash class adults are all very impressed and proud of the children’s creations and believe there are some budding artists!

We have also learnt about the life cycle of a butterfly and have learnt a song about this and the process that a caterpillar goes through to become a butterfly. Some of us had a go at a sequencing activity where we cut out and ordered the stages of the cycle in the right order.

We have been busy making our own caterpillars out of the egg boxes that we had been collecting. We painted them to look like a caterpillar and then added some antennae on to the head.

3D Minibeasts!

As mentioned from last weeks page, the children started to create some Paper Mache minibeasts. They dried for the children to be able to paint their minibeast and they have done a fantastic job. We had bumble bees, spiders, ladybirds, butterflies and many more. Here are the children finishing off their 3D minibeasts and they look fabulous on the display in the classroom!