Creating Elf Hats

This week we have continued our topic of ‘Christmas’. For the upcoming weeks leading up to Christmas we are going to focus on one element of Christmas each week, linked to the songs we are learning for our Christmas performance. This week we have been learning about elves and we have had lots of fun decorating our elves workshop. The children have had a great time decorating presents with glitter and different materials. They have also practised their wrapping skills by wrapping different types of paper around cotton reels. All of the children have enjoyed helping to create elf hats, using the sewing machine  and they have all been keen to try and feed the felt through the machine. We have also all worked together to create a large sleigh for our Christmas performance. The children  had a great time ripping up paper and then mixing it with glue and water to create paper mache. The children have all decided on the colours they would like to use to decorate the sleigh and we are all looking forward to making the sleigh look very beautiful next week.  

We have spent lots of time this week, practising our Christmas performance. The children can now confidently sing and dance to the songs. We just need to practise reading our Christmas poems. The children love our performance practises and they ask everyday if we can practise it more than once each day. We have now made almost all of our costumes and the children are all so excited to show the performance to their parents and grandparents.

In phonics this week we have been working on the h sound. We worked together to select the different h flashcards and the children enjoyed identifying the different things which begin with the letter h. We started the week by creating a large letter h for the display. The children enjoyed filling the hand by painting their hands and creating handprints within the h. We then focused on the word ‘horse’. The children needed to concentrate a lot when creating a horse jigsaw. Each child decided how many pieces they wanted for their puzzle. They each then cut up their puzzle into their desired number of pieces and every child managed to reassemble the pieces to create the original horse picture. It was great to see how organised the children are becoming! Next, we focused on the word ‘heart’. The children used lots of different coloured materials to create a collaged heart picture. The  children needed to concentrate a lot to fill their heart. Amrita, Jordi and Marcel really impressed me when they were able to independently sound out and write the word heart on to their work. Finally, we focused on the word ‘happy’. All of the children enjoyed creating their own happy face picture and we also enjoyed learning the song ‘if you’re happy and you know it’.

In maths this week we have enjoyed learning about symmetry. We have used a range of Christmas pictures, such as presents, stars, Santa, baubles and snowflakes. The children have loved learning how to create a symmetrical picture and they now all fully understand the importance of drawing and colouring the exact same image on each side, to ensure that the picture is symmetrical. It was a very tricky skill as we had to really think how to draw the same image but in the opposite direction.  The children have loved learning about symmetry and we now have a very colourful display of symmetrical pictures up in the classroom. All of the children have asked if we can do some more symmetry so we will continue this within our maths lessons next week.

In reading comprehension this week, the girls have continued to work on the genre of fictional stories. We have worked on the themes of characterisation, inference, paragraph structure, mythical stories and legends. Both girls have become confident to identify the different elements of a fictional story. Towards the end of the week the children had the opportunity to create their own fictional stories, using all of the elements they have learnt about during the previous two weeks.  The children have decided on the content, characters, setting and title of the story. They have loved having the opportunity to use their own imagination and they have been extremely motivated to work on their stories independently. The girls have enjoyed creating their own illustrations and they are both really proud of the books they are creating. Both girls have been focusing on their spelling and I have encouraged them to use the dictionary  to check any spellings they are unsure of. We have also been working on the technique of proof – reading to ensure that what they have written makes sense when read aloud. We are all really looking forward to the girls reading their stories to us next week.

In maths this week, we have been learning about the order of operations. Both girls found the BIDMAS method very difficult to understand and we needed to spend a lot of time together working out how to use the method to ensure that we had the correct answer to the number problems. Once we had worked out the method, Judit became very motivated by the problems and she wanted to try to solve more problems, using the method, on her own. Sara found the method very difficult to understand. Therefore, we spent this week revising her multiplications, using her knowledge of the times tables to find the multiples of factors of different numbers. We also worked on the concept of prime numbers.  Both girls are now becoming very confident to identify whether a number is or isn’t a prime number, using the knowledge they of their times tables. They are now both becoming much more confident to work out the  multiplication problems in their heads. We will continue to work on BIDMAS next week to ensure that both girls understand and can use the method independently. 

In punctuation and grammar this week,  Sara has continued to work on direct speech. The activities she completed required her to insert the correct punctuation and insert the speech marks in the correct place within the sentence. Sara found this very difficult and was unable to re-write the sentences correctly. When correcting her work, Sara was able to recognise the mistakes she had made and by the end of the activity she was able to self-correct her work. We will continue to work on direct speech particularly the concept of starting a new line every time a new person speaks.  Judit has been learning about noun phrases,  with a particular focus on subordinate clauses.  Judit was very confident to identify which parts of the sentence were subordinate clauses and she was able to re-write the sentences and insert her own subordinate clause,  which made sense within the context of the sentence.