Ivy asked “How do you read a book with words without a grownup?”  So today we are going to introduce the children to packs of books without words initially. In very small groups an adult will look at a book with the children, each of them will have the same book. We will begin by talking about key parts of the book - cover, title, pages etc. Then we will open the book and talk about each page, commenting on what they notice. We will talk about illustrations and about what they think is happening in the story. At the end of the book we will ask the children to recap what the story was about. Then they will swap with another small group so that all the children have a turn.  The children who are not working with an adult will have the opportunity to look at books and play with story characters. At the end we will gather together and have a class story - where the adult will point to print / words as they read and encourage the children to talk about letters that they can spot and where they should start reading.

Sports Day today.  The children will be working in colour teams (please make sure that you send your child to school wearing their PE shorts and the colour t-shirt specified in a recent email). They will be taking part in the following activities:

• Javelin
• Egg and spoon
• Bean Bag on heads
• Balance bike race
• Jumping
• Water relay

Reserve Sports Day. If the weather is not good on Tuesday then we will run Sports Day today. The following activity will then take place on Tuesday.

Today we will have three challenges for the children to resolve. The children can choose which challenge that they would like to work on - so they don’t need to work in their usual groups. The three challenges will be as follows:

• Jasper asked - “How do we kick footballs hard?” The group working on this will need to decide how they know whether a football has been kicked hard. For example, is it because the kick makes a loud sound or because the ball travels a long way? Then they will need to decide what techniques they are going to use, for example, do some shoes work better than others / do you need to run and kick or stand and kick? Once they have carried out their exploration and come up with an answer that they agree on they will then need to feed this back to the other groups.
• Marley asked - “How do we climb trees?” Henry asked - “How do we climb to the top of a mountain?” We will explain that we can’t climb the trees at school and we haven’t got any mountains in the playground, however we will ask the children to share ideas about how they could get something up to or down from the top of a tree or a mountain if they couldn’t climb. What could they use in the playground to help them? We will encourage them to carry out their ideas. They will be given a beanbag that they will need to put as high as they can. What do they notice? What works well? Once they have put the beanbag as high as they can they will need to give feedback to the other groups.
• Jasper asked - “How do we keep balloons in the air?” The group working on this will need to decide how they are going to keep balloons in the air, for example, are they going to use parts of their bodies or pieces of equipment? Are they going to all work together with one balloon or have one balloon each? They will need to talk about what they notice and what they discover. They will need to agree on the best strategy and then feedback to the other groups.

We will begin today by recalling the Owls Babies story that we read yesterday. We will link this to Sunnie’s question - “How do owls jump?” We will share ideas about how owls jump before explaining that the children are going to create a jumping owl. Firstly they will need to cut out the wings from a  template. We will remind them about scissor grip and how to snip and cut effectively and safely . Then they will need to decorate their wings by using scraps of fabric and paper and glue these on. We will remind them about how to use glue spreaders with one hand and how not to spread glue across the table. Whilst their wings are drying they will need to decide where to position eyes, a beak and legs (so they look like they are jumping!) before gluing these in place. Finally they will need to glue the wings onto the owl body.

Friday

 Ernie asked - “How do we open doors?” So … today we are going to look at keys and padlocks. Each group will be given a set of padlocks and keys. Some of the padlocks will have groups of dots on them and the keys will have numbered tags. Adults will show the children a  number of fingers and they will need to decide which numeral would match this number of fingers. They will then need to find a padlock with the correct number of dots that matches the numeral etc. We will make sure that each child has the opportunity to have a turn. We will also have some cable locks with combinations to unlock - the children will need to read the ‘combination code’ by recognising or counting how many spots there are on the ‘combination code’ card and then one child will rotate the hub to the correct numeral until all four numbers have been found and the lock is opened.