They have worked really hard to include adjectives in their creature descriptions and have shown great imagination! They have also focused on remembering to use our "five finger checker" to help with presentation and sentence writing. This is something we use in class to prompt the children and to encourage them to check aspects of their own writing. The five checks are - write on the line, finger spaces, neat handwriting, capital letters and full stops. 

Foxes have also been busy outside this week. On Monday the whole class spent the morning at Churt recreation ground taking part in a carousel of learning activities.

They collected nature to practise estimating, comparing and measuring, made models of plants and trees from nature they found, followed a photo trail to plot locations on a map, used their senses to write about being outside and identified trees in our local area.

After a picnic lunch we returned to school for the afternoon. There the children looked at art work and sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy and used his pieces as inspiration to create their own.

In maths this week, Fox Class have been understanding arrays and counting in multiples of 2s, 5s and 10s.  They used the 100 number squares and number lines to help them find answers to tricky problems as well as counting forwards and backwards.  They followed patterns to count on and drew their findings as pictorial representations. Foxes needed to use their "sticking at it" tool to add and subtract from a given number and it was lovely to hear so many children say "yay, more lovely number problems!" in class. 

Perhaps your Fox would like to spend some pocket money over the holidays, adding up their amounts and working out how much change they may receive?

Next term we will continue to work on recognising and knowing the value of different denominations of coins and notes, making equal amounts and finding totals, and in English next term we will be looking at different journeys, along with report writing and learning all about asking some probing questions!

Half term homework

Homework folders were not sent home this week. Instead please print off the documents that have been emailed to you separately, cut them out and use them to help practise and review phonics over half-term. The sounds provided have been taught in Reception and Yr 1.  Practising little and often over half-term would be the most effective.  These are some ideas about how to use them:

• Place them face down. The child picks one at a time and recalls the sound. 
• Timer challenge - how quickly can you recall all of the sounds? How many sounds can you recall in one minute? 
• Can they find any that make the same sound? 
• Recall them in different voices - whisper, loud, low, high.
• Can they spot any of these sounds in words at home or in places they visit over half term? 

We hope you all enjoy the sunshine and have a super half-term.