Our small world has been transformed into the jungle where Elmer and his friends live.  The children enjoy retelling the story of Elmer using the characters to sequence the story and some children have even tried using different voices for the characters.

In maths, we are building on our understanding of 'fewer than' and 'more than' through the comparison of quantities. We discovered that objects in some sets can be matched without any left over, so the quantities of objects can be equal. We investigated how many objects we could hold in one hand, and we tried to hold an equal amount in both hands. We used the balance scales and a range of different objects to investigate equal independently.

In phonics, we have learnt the alternative ow sound in elbow, and the trigraph ear, air and ure. Ask your child to explain digraph and trigraph to you - they love spotting these in our phonics lessons. 

We are working hard to develop our handwriting skills and this week we learnt the correct formation for the letters j and y. These new letters were a bit of a challenge. We start at the top, then go over to the left, before looping to the right. We had quite a few floating letters in our handwriting books. 

We continued our pencil control practise on the blue table, by following the patterns on Elmer with coloured pens. We also learnt how to use a ruler by drawing vertical and horizontal lines to create a patchwork elephant.

 Our creative activities will be a two-week project, as we continue the Elmer theme into next week. This is a taster of the 3D puffy Elmers to come. 

The WOW moment of the week was discovering that our ice art had finally frozen. The Bears had been waiting weeks for this to happen, with some children checking them daily. Everyone was so excited to reveal their art, and they have been inspired to search for other ice sculptures in our outdoor area during this cold weather.