This half term Acorns have settled in to their new surroundings really well. It is lovely for us to see a busy and thriving Foundation area with a full cohort of 15 children, all wearing their new purple uniform too! So far this half term the children have been learning about good listening skills and practised these when identifying different sounds they might hear around the house or at the park. They have also begun to look at individual sounds and have learnt s,a,t and p already. The children have been exploring making different marks and learning how to hold a pen in an effective way. In their maths lessons they have enjoyed making patterns and spotting numbers in the environment, they have focused on lining objects up to count them and being able to identify more or less in a group. Last week the class walked up the big hill to All Saints Church, whilst there they found out about the different features of a church and even got to ring the bell! In the classroom they reflected on the things they saw and made their own stained glass window as a class on the window in the reflection area .

Acorns have continued to enjoy accessing different areas of the curriculum and the classroom throughout their school day. They have continued to develop their confidence in using phase 3 phonics, they are now able to recognise digraphs and trigraphs in words and are able to answer yes and no questions by reading the sentences. They have been practising writing captions and short sentences and have become really good at using their finger spacers as part of their writing. In maths they have been learning how to understand and solve addition and subtraction sentences and they have been getting better at writing numbers using an accurate formation. This half term the lessons have been based around Dinosaurs, they have learnt lots of facts about dinosaurs, found out about carnivores, herbivores and omnivores and have been busy finding out about skeletons. In music the children have become really confident finding the pulse and showing it in different ways and they are enjoying their PE lessons outside where they have been practising their ball skills.

The children have had a busy first week back after the Easter holidays. We have started our new topic about dinosaurs with finding out about what hatches from an egg, the children were really interested in a video showing how a chick develops inside the egg before it hatches. In our phonics lessons we have been recapping some of our phase 3 sounds whilst building our confidence in reading and writing sentences. In maths this week we have been building numbers beyond 10 using numicon, dienes cubes and writing it in a whole part grid. Next week we will be looking at life cycles and continuing our dinosaur topic with a look at Harry and the Dinosaurs books.