Maple Class - Spring 1, week 3
Date: 23rd Jan 2026 @ 3:29pm
This week we read Handa’s Surprise by Eileen Browne and we discovered that Handa lives in a village in Kenya. We talked about what it is like to live in Africa and found out there are mountains, deserts, rainforests and savannas. We looked at a map of Africa to find Kenya. We created our own small world savannah in the tough tray. We thought about how Hand’s house is different to our own houses. Some of the things we discussed were that her house is made of mud, it has a grass rood, there is only one room, there isn’t a door, there aren’t any windows.
In Phonics this week we learnt the level 3 diagraphs sh (as in ship, shop), th (moth), th (feather), ng (as in ring, song). We also learnt three more tricky words – be, me, we. We have demonstrated our phonics knowledge in writing words and captions as well as short sentences.
During Explore and Learn time we demonstrated amazing independent writing.
In maths we used the numicon to find pairs to 5. We had to prove that both 4 & 1 and 3 & 2 were correct. We partitioned 5 in different ways using the part, part, whole model. We used the pegs and boards to show different ways to make 5.
We have our second ukulele lesson this week. We had to press our middle fingers onto the blue dot on the C string to play D.
In RE we thought about where we belong and which groups do some religious people belong to. We thought about how we all belong to our family and discussed how this makes us feel happy, safe, great, good and loved. We talked about how we have a school badge and this shows we belong to our school. We may also belong to clubs, groups and teams which also have special badges or logos. We looked at some religious symbols which represent Christianity, Islam and Judaism.
In PSED we read Tilda Tries Again by Tom Percival and when we decided to give up and do nothing, we stopped the story and discussed how we could encourage Tilda to carry on. We came up with things such as - “just try your best”, “ we can help you”, “try again, it’s okay”, “show resilience”, “positivity” and “don’t worry”.
On Friday we read the story Finn’s Little Fibs by Tom Percival and discussed the importance of being honest and how it will make us feel better if we are honest about things. We came across a new word – fragile, and discussed that this meant.
In Forest School this week we decided to embrace the rain and wanted to do some puddle jumping, but annoyingly we couldn’t find any! We used the chalks to paint the playground. We threaded leaves onto sticks and looked for bugs. We also found the first signs of our spring flowers appearing – snowdrops! We enjoyed going around the trim trail and did get rather muddy! At the end we read the story Clean Up by Nathan Byron, from our story vote, and decided we would like to do a litter pick next time in Forest School, which will be the week after next (due to Mrs Duffey being on a course next Friday afternoon). We also said we'd like to design some ‘don’t drop litter’ posters.
Well done to BeaBea, Arlo, Joey and Lili who received awards in celebration assembly this week.
Have a lovely weekend, it looks like it will continue to be a soggy one!
