Maple class - Spring 1, week 4
Date: 30th Jan 2026 @ 8:41am
This week we have read Zog by Julia Donaldson and found out about castles. We learnt about eh features of a castle – battlements, moat, keep, portcullis, tower, arrow slits, great hall, drawbridge. We made some amazing observations on these things such as “the portcullis is made from metal, the baddies can’t break the metal”, “they shoot arrows through the slits by the enemy can’t shoot them”, “they pull up the drawbridge to stop the baddies getting in”.
On Tuesday we had the Ampney Crucis Literature Festival (please listen to Cotswold Radio between 3pm-4pm on Sunday 1st February to hear the Ampney Crucis School Literature Festival Interviews). We have been so lucky to meet some authors this week who did some amazing work with us. We met Sally Grindley who read us ‘Shhh!!!’. We have to ben really quiet when Sally read this book as we didn’t want to wake the giant. We had a big surprise when we saw the giant’s eye had opened” We loved seeing all the characters in ‘Knock, Knock Who’s There’. We also met John Daugherty and loved listening to his funny poems! He read us two books called ‘There’s a Pig Up My Nose!’ and ‘The Hare Shaped Hole’. Click here to find out what the story is about by John himself. John also sang some songs and played his guitar.
In phonics we have learnt the diagraphs ‘ai’ and ‘ee’ (remember these are two letters which make one sound). We also learnt the tricky word ‘was’ and spelt the tricky words ‘I’, ‘no’ and ‘go’. We thought about which part of the word makes these tricky and underlined them.
In maths we have used our knowledge of number pairs to 5 to help find subtraction pairs from 5. We have also made our own repeating patterns using 2d shapes – we created some wonderful crowns with these on Friday afternoon.
We loved thinking about castles during Explore and Learn and showed brilliant team building to construct our own towers and Zog small world. We loved using hammer and nails to build a castle using the tap taps and we made swords, shields and armor when junk modelling. Arlo brought in a book from home called ‘See Inside Castles’ and loved reading this with Mrs Duffey and his friends and sharing it with the class. We then compared it to photos of Warwick Castle and all the children were very interested in the historic martial sport of jousting. We watched a YouTube video on the War of the Roses, the jousting event that takes place daily at Warwick Castle.
In our ukulele lesson this week we were all superstars as we read music! We played 2 songs and started to learn song 3. We learnt was a ‘c’ looks like on the ‘stave’ and that these notes are called crotchets. We are getting really confident at holding the ukulele’s.
In PSED this week we enjoyed listening to the story Stuck by Oliver Jeffers. It is about a boy named Floyd who gets his kite stuck up a tree. He throws up a show to try and shift it, followed by many other objects, all of which get stuck. We thought about how Floyd showed resilience and perseverance in trying to get his kite from the tree.
We have been thinking about our new 3 key words this week – ready, respectful and safe. These are what we should be demonstrating all the time around the school.
Have a wonderful weekend.
