Reception investigates several sorts of slimy snails.

Another week packed with activity and learning. After a quick chat with ‘talking partners’ we discovered that between us we knew quite a lot about snails. A non-fiction Usborne text entitled ‘Snails’ added to the children’s knowledge and they all wrote some interesting facts for their writing in class. Story recall of ‘Odo the Snail’ on Friday was for some the best writing of the week with a few adventurous children not listening to the lesson objective and writing their own snail stories! At last some of the ‘Wow words’ are appearing in our writing; ‘Odo was slithering down the tree’ He loved to eat the juicy leaves’. ’Suddenly lots of birds scurried towards him’.

We watched the Whale and the Snail’ on You Tube and made a model as well as doing snail sums as an indoor orienteering activity.

Spellings this week were more demanding with a few more year one words to learn. Many children missed their full marks this week by not putting capital letters for Mr and Mrs and ‘children’ was a challenging word to spell. Most remembered that a sentence starts with a capital letter in the dictated sentence but either forgot the full stop at the end or spelt one or more of their spelling words incorrectly.

Our science work involved observing and investigating the way in which snails moved and what they choose to eat. Each group had 4 or 5 different size snails to observe and photograph and then our findings were recorded after an interesting discussion.

The butterflies left us and flew away to freedom although one was particularly attached to Martha and a few others made a dangerous start by fluttering to the floor where they were nearly squashed by the children eager to wave them off.

Art and technology this week reintroduced the children to the artist Henri Matisse and his work called L’Escargot.(The snail) Having observed snails in their investigation and drawn them throughout the week,, the children were convinced that their paper collages would look more like a snail than the great artist himself had achieved. Look at some of the pictures and see what you think!

Our first week back we will focus on spiders. No live spiders please, snails were hard enough to keep track of!

In class this half term we have been revising the ‘ phonic sounds’ learnt in the spring term (the ones that are on the white cards in the word box) Please find some time this holiday to practise them. Being able to recognise them as a unit of sound is one requirement, the second and most useful is being to recognise them within words when reading (hence the word lists.) There is a good website that the children could play games to practise. We are currently working on phase 4 but have done many of Phase 5 also. Games like Buried Treasure and Picnic on Pluto we have played in school. Try some on the computer at home over the holiday. It is: http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/PicnicOnPluto.html

Please make time to do some reading, writing and a bit of maths but most of all have some fun, get rid of any lurking germs and have a great holiday if you are going away.