Dear Parents and Carers,

This week we continued our learning, ‘What are your favourite stories?’ In the woods we found some wonderful clues linked to stories and the children have enjoying talking and sharing their ideas. We have been busy learning about Mothering Sunday.

What are your favourite stories?

This week we read the story ‘The Gingerbread Man’. The children have been retelling the story and creating story maps.

We are very lucky to have a wonderful woodland area and we use it regularly to support our learning. This week the children found a variety of story props and characters in the woods. They were looking for clues to link the props to stories. The woods were filled with rich language, excitement and wonder. The children were retelling the stories, identifying missing characters and sharing their favourite parts of the stories. This is one of the many activities we are doing to help children confidently talk about which stories are their favourite and why.

Lego Discovery – Six Bricks

Every child has now received a Lego Duplo box with two sets of six bricks. Also, an e-mail has been sent with supporting information regarding the six bricks activities. We will be providing you with new activities each week via this newsletter. We hope you have enjoyed the activities so far, thank you to those of you who have already shared your experiences in the red home school link book. If you have any questions about using the six bricks at home, please ask the class teacher.

Discover Six Bricks Spatial Skills

Try using a variety of these instructions and I’m sure you will think of many more.

1. Lay out the bricks in any order (see the above image)
2. Then they put a finger on the red brick and move it left
3. They turn the dark blue brick upside down (or on its side)
4. Put the green brick on top of the yellow brick
5. Put the red brick under the orange brick
6. Put the dark blue brick on top of the green brick only covering 4 studs
7. Pick up the first and last brick and swap them over
8. Pick up the red and green brick and swap places (vary the colours)

As an extension you could ask them to use particular hands i.e pick up the red brick with your left hand and the green brick with your right hand.

Build a Cube – Ask your child to build a cube so it does not fall apart. If they find this tricky they could copy one you have already made. Once they are able to build their own cube ask them to give you instructions to build an identical cube.

Lego Discovery session 2

It was wonderful to see the children having fun and working collaboratively. They worked together as a team to create a building found in the community. They built a house, fire station, castle, police station and a church. It was a successful and very creative second session.

FOPPS Mother’s Day Shop

The PTA (FOPPS) will be selling small gifts for Mother’s Day on Wednesday 18^th and Thursday 19^th March. The gifts are priced at £1 each. If your child would like to buy something they can bring in no more than £2 and we will take them along to the shop during the day.

Maths

In maths, we have introduced measures. This week we have been focusing on length (how long or short things are) and height (how tall or short things are). We have been putting things in order of their height or length. The children have been using cubes to measure items, e.g. “the pen is 12 cubes long”.  We have introduced the following signs :

• = (equals, the same, balance)
• < (less than)
• > (greater than, more than)

and using these to help us to compare two amounts and then to say complete number sentences. So for 5 < 8, we have been saying “5 is less than 8”.

The children have enjoyed using a ramp to roll cars down. We wrote a number line on a long piece of paper and measured how far along the track the cars could roll.

Home Learning

• Try some of the six bricks activities. Let us know how you get on.
• Bring in your favourite book to share with the class (we will try and read them all over the next couple of weeks).
• Bake some gingerbread people.
• Compare heights and lengths of objects saying when something is taller or shorter/ longer or shorter.

Dates to remember

FOPPS Mother’s Day Shop – 18^th and 19^th March (during the school day)

Trip to Pennywell Farm – Wednesday 25^th March

End of Term – Friday 27^th March

Summer Term Starts – Tuesday 14^th April

From Mrs Bastin, Mrs Clague and the Foundation Stage Team