First we listened to the story, and then we discussed the main characters, setting and events.  To help us try and remember key events, we role-played scenes from the story.  During this session the children worked with their talk-partners to think of questions for the old man from the story, before getting the chance to hot seat 'him'!  Next the children drew story maps of the main events and used these to retell the story to each other.

During the next session the children learnt about story mountains.  These are used to help children visualise main events and familiar sequences of stories.  The children were taught how to identify five parts that most stories have: a beginning, a build-up, the main problem/s, a resolution and an ending.  They plotted “The Enormous Turnip” into these five parts and next week the children will use this learning to plan and write their own changes to the resolution and ending of “The Enormous Turnip”.

Last week in science we started an experiment to see if we could get seeds to spout in plastic bags.  This week we have been observing them and noticed that some have sprouted.  We spent time discussing reasons why some had sprouted and some had not.  The children decided to add water to their seeds and some decided to place the seeds differently within the bag.  We will continue to observe them for another week and see what results we get.

In maths this week Fox Class have been learning how to identify and represent numbers using the language of more than and less than.   Working in pairs and small groups, they used number cards, bricks and counters to count on one more and one less. Some children went on to draw pictures to record their answers.  Others solved some tricky word problems using tens frames to move the counters to show one more than and one less, describing their answers in words as well as numbers.  Next week they will be looking at number bonds to 10 and 20 with simple addition and subtraction problems to solve.

Perhaps you can you ask your children what numbers make 20? Or perhaps, if I had 20 sweets and my best friend ate 15, how many would I have left?

Please can parents ensure that children are practising their spellings little and often each week, and are learnt for Fridays, and please can reading books and diaries come to school each day.  Many thanks everyone.