Maple Class 26-27 - Autumn 1, week 7
Date: 16th Oct 2026 @ 12:07pm
We’ve had another busy week!
We have been thinking about the story ‘The Enormous Turnip’ this week and learning about pushes and pulls. We identified whether we needed to push or pull when doing different activities and used our arms to distinguish between them. We spent a rainy afternoon in Forest School on Monday and had so much fun thinking about pushes and pulls. Some children created a shelter and had to pull the large sticks along the floor to where they wanted to build the shelter. Some children made mud paint and had to push the brush around the pan to mix the water and mud. Some children made leaf prints using mud and had to push the leaf down and then pull it back up. They also noticed that we push people on the swing, pull the gate open and pull the logs up to look for bugs.
We have continued learning new sounds, this week we’ve learnt ck, e, r, u. We also learnt that ‘ck’ is a digraph which means two letters that make one sound, and it’s usually found at the end of words. We learnt our first two tricky words this week – ‘the’ and ‘to’ and read them in captions during our phonics lessons. We explain these to the children as ‘words we can’t use our sounds to read’. We hope the children are enjoying bringing home books with words, they were excited to talk about their ‘books with words’ in at the end of the week! Their segmenting and blending of words in the classroom has been amazing so we are hopeful that they will begin their reading journey with confidence. We had a go at writing a caption this week – It is a sun. Wow, all children worked really hard and we were so impressed with their writing. Their letter formations are really coming along, we have been practising these in shaving foam, oats and chalk as well as on whiteboards and pencils.
In Maths we are still focusing on number ‘6’. We have been thinking about counting accurately using number tracks, counting objects in different orders and seeing if we still have the same amount. Some of the children have given super explanations of what they notice and why counting may not be correct, for example, when using a number track to count objects, “there are two objects on number two and none on number 5, there should be one object for one number”, and when thinking about where we can start counting, “he started counting in the middle, he should have started at an end; he didn’t go back to count the ones at the beginning.” These observations will really support the children’s understanding and explanations of problem solving in maths as they progress. We also thought about how the count of a set of objects doesn’t change no matter the size, or if the objects are moved around, as long as nothing extra is added or taken away. One child observed “the cars are bigger and taking up more room than the trains, but it doesn’t mean there are more cars than trains” – great observations, well done, they knew there were still 6 cars and 6 trains, no matter their size. We made some fantastic play dough monsters this week, and each monster needed to have 6 eyes – the eyes were all different sizes and we loved getting creative!
We were very excited to go to our first Harvest Festival at the church. The children walked beautifully down and back with their year 6 buddy who were great at engaging in conversation with the Maple children. We also sat and listened in church really well and performed our ‘Big Red Combine Harvester’ song brilliantly and with such confidence. Well done Maple children, the grown-ups are really proud of you.
In PSHE this week we read the story What the Ladybird Heard and thought about all the different ways the animals communicate, and how the ladybird communicated with all the animals to let them know a plan for protecting the fine prize cow! We thought about what ‘communication’ means and how we communicate to each other, thinking about our value this term - Respect.
Our last group of children made Gingerbread men on Friday afternoon, lots of weighing, mixing, observing, rolling and stamping out of the gingerbread was done. Again the classroom, and school, smelt amazing – we will miss this smell next week!
Have a wonderful weekend and we look forward to seeing you all next week for our last week before half term.
