This week our minibeast focus is on snails and slugs! We have shared lots of information and stories about these interesting molluscs, and now we have learnt so much more. Ask us about how a snail can see and smell! How does it have babies? We have used the snail shells as inspiration for some spectacular spiral artwork, and then we read our focus story, Snail Trail, and used that to give us some great ideas for our own 'snail trail' journey, exploring positional language to direct our snails around obstacles. We looked at shapes in our maths this week, for example learning how to use small squares to make big squares. Also, we have used our best writing to make a card... but we can't tell you about that yet!

In Reception this week we have been looking at the Enormous Turnip and performing to the class. The children have enjoyed adapting the story with their own vegetables and fruit. The story was great for comparing the sizes of different objects and characters. Over the last couple of days we have been in preparation for our Platinum Jubilee celebrations. We have been making crowns (lots of glitter and stickers!) and drawing a portrait of the Queen in our brand new Sheen Mount sketch books. Dressing up has been fun and the food at the picnic was tasty!

​We are continuing to look at Traditional Tales as our topic in reception. The children have been looking at the Gingerbread Man and The Three Little Pigs. Everyone has loved learning all of the different stories and re-telling them with the finger puppets we have been making. We all made some fantastic houses and Mr Brooks (The Big Bad Wolf) took great pleasure when he came over to try and knock them all down with his leaf blower, the children found this very exciting. The children have been very interested in planting and they are starting to see the sunflowers creep out from the soil. 

We have learnt lots of things about Spring, and this week we saw how the weather can change - last week, sun hats and shorts, this week, woolly hats and gloves! We checked temperatures and talked about all the different types of weather that make up Spring - what an interesting season it is. To finish up our dinosaur topic, we wrote and talked about all the new things we had learnt - children and teachers! There are definitely some budding palaeontologists at Sheen Mount. Our Easter preparations included making an Easter basket with some delicious 'nests' and equally delicious eggs inside them. Then we did Easter Egg hunts in the playground - we found every single egg, even when it started snowing... We have whizzed through our phonics and completed all of Phase 3, impressing our teachers with the tricky words, digraphs and trigraphs we now know. Bring on Phase 4 - but let's have a holiday first!

In Reception, we know SO much about dinosaurs now that we are making up riddles to see if we can catch our teachers out - and maybe you, too! We wrote short factual sentences as clues to guess which dinosaur we were thinking of. We added to our knowledge by learning about omnivores this week, so ask us what this word means.  In maths, we are learning about number 10 - our first two-digit number! We have been counting to 10, finding out what comes before and after it, and how we can make 10 in lots of different ways. We've been looking forward to Friday - not only is it Red Nose Day, but we are making junk models from the designs we drew earlier in the week! And as well as all this, we are learning about Spring every day - this weather is showery, windy and sunny, and we are watching out for shoots, buds, insects and blossom. 

This week we have been learning more details about dinosaurs. We looked at a dinosaur timeline, and learnt that not all dinosaurs lived at the same time. Then we looked in detail at the carnivore dinosaurs (ask us what carnivore means!) and what special features they needed to survive. Looking carefully at pictures, we drew detailed pictures and labelled them to add to our Dinosaur Museums. We are starting to do some junk-model dinosaurs too! On Thursday we all shared our favourite books, dressing up or bringing in special objects to talk about, and enjoyed going to a special World Book Day assembly in the hall - everyone looked so interesting! And as well as all of this, we are learning lots about the number nine AND sounding and blending some long words in our phonics lessons. Fan/tas/tic!