Driffield Church Of England Voluntary Controlled Infant School

What an action packed week it has been, with snow and very cold temperatures to explore!

This week has been UK Parliament Week. We started off on Monday morning with a special worship. Mrs Callaghan explained what parliament was and where the Houses of Parliament where. We talked about voting and listening to everyone's opinion when deciding what to do. On Monday, after school all the children's entries for the London Landmark competition were displayed in the hall. The exhibition looked amazing and it was so hard to pick a winner from the fantastic models and pictures on display. In today's Celebration Worship, the 6 winners from across the school were announced and I'm delighted to say that Percy in our class was one of the winners. She made a wonderful red, London bus which contained brilliant pictures of all the Hedgehog class in the windows and it even had Mrs Dean as the driver!

We have continued with our daily phonics sessions, this week the children have learnt the phonemes z, zz, qu and ch. We have been practising blending these sounds together to read words and also to segment the sounds in words to spell them. We have continued to practise our letter formation and writing our names every day. Please support us by practising at home using the resources we gave out at the Parent/Teacher Consultation meetings before the half term holiday.

In maths this week we have been learning about the composition of 4 and 5. The children have been generating two parts and putting them together to make a whole. For example, 3 is a part and 1 is a part and whole of me is 4 and 2 is a part and 3 is a part and the whole of me is 5. The children will need to know pairs of numbers which total another number to achieve their Early Learning Goal. You could practise at home by segmenting 4 or 5 objects (toys, grapes, smarties etc) into two groups and then using the stem sentence '____ is a part and _____ is a part and whole of me is _____. You could ask your children, 'how many more to make' questions. For example, I have 4, how many more do I need to make 5 or I have 1 how many more to make 4 etc.

Wednesday was a very exciting day in school, the children were delighted to see so much snow falling down and although it didn't last long, they had the opportunity to play out in the snow. The weather has been extremely cold this week and many children have been bringing in hats, gloves and scarves. Please make sure these are named so we can return them to the right person at the end of the day.

This week our focus has been the story of The 3 Little Pigs. The children have acted out the story and investigated the different materials the pigs used to build their houses. Next week, we will read an alternative version of the story and identify similarities and differences between the two stories.

Please don't forget to next Friday (29th November) is our Fairy Tale and Nursery Rhyme dress up day. If you are having any problems putting a costume together, please don't hesitate to ask.

One final thing, many of the children are not able to fasten their own coats. We want the children to be as independent as possible in school, as they choose to play indoors or outside. Please allow your child to practise fastening their own zip as often as possible, so they can do it independently at school.

Many thanks for your continued support. Wrap up and try to keep warm this weekend!