Maple Class - Term 5 week 2
Date: 9th May 2025 @ 12:59pm
This week we have continued to look at how we can explore the world and looking at cars. We read the book Mr Gumpy’s Motor Car by John Burningham. We thought about our school value ‘Compassion’ and how the characters in the story weren’t showing any compassion when they didn’t want to help, and we talked about how we can show compassion. We looked at Mr Gumpy’s car and talked about how it is different from cars today – the children had amazing observations.
In phonics this week we have recapped some graphemes which we were less familiar with – ‘oa’ as in boat and coat, ‘ar’ as in hard, star and ‘ur’ as in turn, curl. We have all done some brilliant writing this week, whether it be during Explore and Learn, or during our free writing sessions.
In maths we have been taking away from 9. We used numicon to find inverse addition and subtractions. We also used number lines to subtract from 9. We had to start at 9 and then jump back along the number line to solve the subtraction question. We had to make sure we bounced on each number once.
We have been really creative in Explore and Learn this week, making different creations using paper and also painting cherry blossom trees. Della knew that if she mixed red and white that it would make pink, and that you can also get white blossom. When playing with the small world children started singing songs that they had previously heard in school.
Thursday saw us celebrate 80 years since VE day. We had a fantastic day and all the children made such an effort to come dressed in 1940’s clothes – wow Maple, you all looked fabulous. We learnt all about VE Day and that VE is short for Victory in Europe Day which marks the end of the war in Europe in 1945, however the world war didn’t actually end until the 15th August that year. We listened to music from 1940 and the children reconised the song We’ll Meet Again by Vera Lynn as Mrs Wood had played it earlier on in the week. We looked at the Union Jack flag and discussed the shapes and colours we could see in the flag, and we knew that the United Kingdom consists of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We had a tea party outside in the afternoon with the rest of the school and enjoyed a cake and waving our Union Jack napkins! In Explore and Learn children incorporated what they had learnt about the war in their play – we had a great construction master piece of the trenches and Loris recalled her holiday, where she visited the trenches and told us about them, even drawing a picture on the whiteboard and labelling it. We talked about how the children who had to move from the cities to the countryside on trains, to keep safe, may have felt and also how people would have felt when they heard the war was over - we had some fantastic discussions.
We continued to practice our Country Dancing, putting our routine together with music this week and trying to keep to the beat! It was a bit faster than what we had been doing, but we all did really well. We also went over which is our right and left, to help us clapping with our partners.
Lisa from the library came in and read us Tabby McTat by Julia Donaldson before we observed the 2 minute silence for VE Day in Maple class – I was blown away at how well all Maple children sat and showed respect in thinking of all those people who fought in the war so we can have the life we have today. We watched Newsround to find out more and listen to people who were actually alive when World War 2 was going on.
In PSED this week we recapped the story What the Ladybird Heard by Julia Donaldson and played a game of Chinese Whispers, thinking about how things we say can be changed into something else.
Well done to Frankie, Alfie and Ralph who all got awards in our Celebration Assembly this week.
What a busy week we’ve had despite it only being 4 days! Now for the weekend, and hopefully some more nice warm weather.
