A Parade of Elephants

The classroom has gone patchwork elephant crazy this week as we finish our learning about Elmer as part of our colour and pattern topic.  

We have finally completed our 3D puffy Elmers. The process began with painting two A3 patchwork Elmers, next the Elmers were cut out, then we began joining the Elmers together with staples, before stuffing Elmer with newspaper, and finally closing the gap. 

Our puffy Elmers are now hanging around the classroom making it bright and colourful.

We have also created milk bottle Elmers with lots and lots of tissue paper, glue, card, googly eyes and of course milk bottles. 

 We had our first adventure into cooking this week. What did we bake? You've guessed it - elephant biscuits!  The children baked and decorated their own elephant biscuit to take home. They were very excited. 

We have been very busy on our blue writing table. We started the week by writing our weekend news. Then we used the magnifying glasses to spot the tiny high frequency words on the laminated mats, and we wrote a list of the words we found.

Later in the week, we used our phonics to write labels for the different parts of an elephant, and we wrote sentences to describe the colours, shapes and patterns on our pencil control Elmers.  In phonics, we learnt our last phase 3 sound - er. So from now until half-term we will revisit some tricky digraphs and trigraphs that we have already seen. 

In handwriting, we practised the correct letter formation for r and n.

In maths this week we explored composition with 'wholes' and 'parts'. We are beginning to understand that whole things are often made up of smaller parts and that a whole is bigger than its parts. 

We needed our problem-solving skills and resilience for construction this week. We made individual 3D Multilink Elmers, and we worked in groups to build a large Elmer with coloured squares.

Next week we step into space.