Week 5

A new week and a new story! We have been reading Zog by Julia Donaldson, a story about a young dragon who really wants to win a golden star at Dragon School! As we read the story we talked about the words we hadn’t heard before or weren’t exactly sure what they meant, such as ‘keenest’, ‘gleaming’ and ‘hoarse’. We wrote them down and tried to use these new words in our chats and play throughout the week to help to develop a deeper familiarity with the new vocabulary.

Following on from our story writing last week, we recapped the different important elements of a fiction story (character, setting, problem, resolution) and we identified these different element in our Zog story. We then watched a video of the illustrator, Axel Sheffler, explain and demonstrate how he draws Zog and then we all had a go at drawing the main character and labelling the picture using the phonic sounds that we have learnt so far.

In Maths we have been exploring the idea of composition by looking at the concept of ‘wholes’ and ‘parts’. We began by investigating familiar toys and then ourselves, discovering that whole things are often made up of smaller parts and that a whole is, therefore, bigger than its parts. We also clarified that a ‘whole’ meant ‘all of it’ not a ‘hole’ in the ground!! We watched an episode of Numberblocks which then helped us to move this concept on to numbers. We saw how the numbers to 5 were also made up of parts and explored the different ways we could do split them into parts using cubes and sorting hoops.

On Friday we had another chance to use the beebots and input instruction into our friendly little robots to enable them to navigate a course without crashing! Well done Ducklings, we wish you a very happy weekend!