'I wonder what is inside?' and 'I wonder how to save the planet?'

In spring, our classroom themes have been ‘I wonder what is inside?’ followed by 'I wonder how to save the world'.  To begin with, a mysterious egg appeared in our classroom. Children speculated and then began to eliminate animals based on new learning of their classification.  We learnt about mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish.  When our egg hatched, we were all thrilled to meet 'Duffy' the sea turtle.

Later in Spring, we read how Duffy had a lucky escape when she ate plastic in her coastal habitat.  This led to our enquiries into how plastic ended up in the ocean and subsequently learning about the three R's; Reduce, Reuse and Re-cycle!

Children have learnt the names of materials and investigated some properties, such as floating and sinking during our explorations of rubbish.

In maths, we have looked carefully at the composition of numbers up to ten.  Children have been exploring and using the 'five and a bit' structure of numbers 6-10 and have been trying to quickly represent them using fingers, counters on ten frames, and pictures.  We have begun to solve problems such as 'missing parts' using the sentence "First I had.....then.....now I have..."

We have also noticed the repeating 'staircase' pattern of the number system and used it to count beyond 20!

Our phonics this term has focused on reading words with digraphs in.  This has included longer words with double digraphs (tt, mm, dd etc), compound words (laptop, sunset) and words with more than one digraph (shorter, shimmer).  Children have learnt decoding skills such as 'chunking' when tackling larger words like these.

In communication and writing, children have continued to be word collectors.  They have been using their senses to describe a variety of animals, habitats and events from many of our shared reading texts.