We are so excited to welcome our new Sparrows to Hayfield Lane!

As we get to know each other, and the school and routines we embark on our topic of 'Marvellous Me'. We will be thinking all about ourselves, as well as our, and other communities.

To start our topic we are looking at the text 'The Colour Monster Goes to School' by Anna Llenas. 

We have absolutely loved the story - and the Colour Monster! We have coloured our own colour monsters, used puppets to talk about our feelings as well as role play the story, sorted colours in various ways and groups, made play dough monsters, and explored instruments just like the colour monster loves to do! Outside, we drew around each other and then drew our features on our outline in chalk, made vehicles and houses, explored Numicon and the pirate ship and bikes. 

We have also thought about the word 'Community', what it means and our school and class community. To do this we have been practising the names of staff who we see in Sparrows class, been for a walk around the whole school and made a map based on what we saw. We have also looked at how each of us get to school and made a pictogram to reflect this - realising that most of us walk to school! This has all been alongside learning our new friends names, learning our new routines and rules, and having lots of fun! 
 

Our second week brought us letters from the story 'The Day the Crayons Quit'. Each time we received a letter we thought about the clues inside it to help us figure out how each crayon was feeling based on their words.

We then coloured crayons neatly for crayon purple, sunshine in both orange and yellow to stop their argument about who it should be - because when we looked at photos of the sun, it actually looks like both! We also used out fine motor skills to cut out crayons and stick them in a crayon pack, creating rainbows through careful dotting with paint, and role played the story and feelings through dress up. 

 

We then looked at the text 'Who's in My Family'. 

We have been talking lots about what how our families are made up and that all families are different and unique to us. We thought about the meaning of the word 'special' and who our special people are, and drew our families and wrote initial sounds for the names of people in them. 

We also made family portraits using different materials, role played in the home corner, built houses outside, recreated houses with lolly sticks - following the patterns, and completed puzzles of different families too! 

We then moved on to thinking about the Christian celebration of Harvest festival. We looked at who celebrates it, the meaning behind it, and what Harvest is. 

We then looked at the traditional tale the Little Red Hen, learning the repeated refrains until we could tell the story together as a class! 

We explored wheat grains, stalks of wheat, and flour - and used these in a range of ways. 

At the end of the week, we were very excited to make our own bread, although all of us helped and there were no "Not I's" to be heard! We looked at a recipe together, checked we had the right ingredients and then followed instructions carefully to make our tasty bread rolls. We all agreed they looked very yummy, and tasted it too! 

We will continue thinking about Harvest festival over the next few weeks, linking this with people who help us and what jobs other people do - including farmers! 

To kick start thinking about people who help us, we are starting our very first Drawing Club week with 'Super Worm' by Julia Donaldson. 

Our ambitious vocabulary words for the week are: