We started our week sharing the story 'Octopus Shocktopus'. The children then wrote letters to the octopus asking him to come home. Later in the week, we read 'The Storm Whale'. We enjoyed the idea of Noi painting a picture of the whale so we decided to take our painting outside and create our own sea creature paintings.

As part of our themed learning, we have shared some video clips about octopuses and whales. The children have demonstrated fantastic memory of facts relating to these amazing creatures and have used this to inspire their writing. We have decided to create a class information book too. We are really enjoying all the writing opportunities around our classroom at the moment and demonstrating our phonic knowledge.

In maths, we built on our learning of odd and even numbers to now share objects into groups equally. We thought about sharing food between a whale and an octopus. Sometimes we noticed that there was an odd number because there was one extra.

In the messy trays outside we have been exploring slimy spaghetti and blue Jell-o with sea creatures inside.

We did some more weeding of our mud kitchen and then tried putting some grass seed down to tidy it up. Marwell have some really super gardeners!

Our Year 1s have continued to demonstrate excellent progress in their learning as well as their personal and social skills. You will see that they are great role models for our Reception children, showing good turn-taking and modelling of how to play games and discover learning through the opportunities provided. Year 1 have particularly enjoyed their science learning this week where we have been thinking what makes a living thing.

Ahoy There!
This week has been Pirate Week.

We made our own treasure maps, staining the paper with tea bags to make them look authentic. We also used scissors and various resources to help attach paper together to create our own pirate hats. It was brilliant to see the children developing their skills of using the sellotape and stapler more independently as the week progressed.

We also created a giant boat outside using crates and boxes and wrote on our pirate maps.

In the outside area, we made the most of the sun and discovered lots of learning through water play. Some of us thoroughly enjoyed exploring the sensory gelli baff play where he looked for fishes and then turned it into the ship slop.

In maths, we began to look at odds and evens. We worked in pairs to create an example of an odd number and an even number on a tens frame. We used excellent collaboration skills. We also explored the number 100. As a class we created a 100 cube track- we couldn't believe how long it was!

Oh we do like to be beside the seaside!

Thank you for the photos you have sent in. The children were very confident to talk about their experiences of visiting the seaside. If you have any more we always love seeing them.

This week we have been having picnics in the role play area, creating our own seaside pictures using paint and other craft resources and playing with shells in the sand tray. We also set up a counting challenge with shells and numbers inside which the children enjoyed. Of course, by the beach is where you would find a lighthouse so we worked collaboratively to build one and use it to safely sail around.

On Friday, we celebrated Empathy Day and learned all about understanding each other's feelings to help us be good friends. We created our own Empathy glasses to help us use this superpower.

Obviously we had a wonderful day on Sports Day thank you for supporting us! We were so proud of the children and how well they did. Congratulations to the children in Ruby House on their win.

A big thank you to Sofia's Dad for adding to our knowledge all about construction and sharing all about his job as a builder. It was inspiring for our futures.