Maple Class - Term 4 week 5

Date: 28th Mar 2025 @ 1:11pm

This week’s focus we have continued with animal life cycles learnt about the lifecycle of a frog.  We have loved reading the story of  Tad by Benji Davies and we spotted the changes as Tad grew. We ordered our own life-cycle of a frog and found the words in a word bank to label wach stage.  Some children decided to draw their frog lifecycles outside using chalk.  Theyw ere brilliant at explaining it. 

In phonics this week we finished learning all of our Level 3 sounds.  This week we learnt the last two sounds ‘ure’ (as in pure, sure) and ‘er’ (as in letter, perm, hammer).  We did some brilliant reading and writing of words and sentences and also read words with the level 3 digraphs and trigraphs posting them into Robot Rick.  We also played a Level 3 word game to practice reading words with level 3 sounds in. 

In maths this week we have been partitioning 9.  We made pairs to 8 using numicon, we were so quick at this!  We wrote our number sentences to math each pair of numicons making 8.  We also had a challenge to make an octopus with it’s 8 tentacles made up using 2 different colours.  We wrote a number sentence on them to match.  Ralph chose to make a octopus using the K’Nex with 5 red legs and 3 orange legs.  We have also been combining 2D shapes to make other shapes and completed some brilliant puzzles.

As it’s Mothers Day this Sunday we learnt about why we celebrate it and made some gorgeous cards and gifts (we won’t spoil the surprise!)

Thursday we visited Abbey Home Farm and had an amazing morning learning all about what they do there.  We saw all the vegetables growing, visited the huge greenhouse and polytunnels.  We saw rocket being packed up ready to sell in the Farm shop and even tasted it.  We also got to taste the spinach being grown in the green house too.  We then went and had snack in the Nursery garden while the Nursery children were off out and about around the farm.  After snack we visited the farm animals – pigs, sheep, cows and chickens, and learnt all about how the cows are milked and how long the animals spend on the farm. 

We planted our own runner bean seeds this week in our jam jars, we cant wait to see the roots and shoots grow.  We will send them home at Easter and look forward to hearing about how they are continuing to grow at home. 

In RE this week we reminded the children about the Easter story and thought about the different parts of the story from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday.

In PSED we read the story Monkey Puzzle by Julia Donaldson and thought about why the monkey doesn’t know who he is and why the butterfly keeps finding the wrong animals for his mum.  We discussed what we look like and how we are all different and unique.

Things children have said that they have enjoyed in Maple class this week:

Octaviah – I enjoyed the farm

Della – I enjoyed seeing the chickens

Leone – I enjoyed going to the farm and seeing the cows

India – I enjoyed going to the farm and seeing the pigs

Daisy-Mai – I enjoyed seeing the chickens

Loris – I loved seeing the pigs

Alice – I enjoyed looking at the pigs and watching them have piggy backs

Alfie – I loved seeing the pigs poo!

Ralph – I liked seeing the pigs

Szymon – I liked seeing the farm and the cows

Sophie – I liked the cows licking my hand

Bunny – I loved it when the cows licked my hand

Frankie – I liked seeing the cows

Felix – I liked seeing the sheep

Woody – I enjoyed playing with Edward in the playground