Hedgehog Class News

We hope you all had an enjoyable time over the Christmas break and wish you a Happy New Year!  It has been lovely to welcome the children back to school and hear of all their news.  We have been impressed by how confidently the children have settled back into our class and school routines. 

This term in Hedgehogs we will be continuing to develop children's confidence, curiosity and independence across all areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) curriculum. 

This week children have been applying their phonetic knowledge in their writing by practising writing cvc words during our Read Write Inc. (RWI) lessons. They have been carefully segmenting the given word into the individual sounds in order to write each sound down to spell the word.  

In maths this week our focus is on comparison.  We have been developing our mathematical language when comparing quantities, using the language of fewer than, more than and equal number of.  Children have been encouraged to reason their thinking when comparing groups by matching them 1:1. 

This week we have shared the stories of 'Shark in the Park' and 'Shark in the Snow' and following this have been looking again at rhyme with children completing a rhyming word matching activity. 

The changing weather has also sparked lots of interest and discussion this week.  Children were very excited to talk about the recent flurry of snow, with some sharing stories of mini snowmen built at home.  As the weather has turned colder we have been talking about seasonal changes and the features of Winter weather, linking this to their understanding of the world around them.  

This week Hedgehogs enjoyed a visit to Wiggery Woods on a bright and frosty morning.  

Mr Cooper met with us and spoke about the importance of feeding the birds during the cold weather when their usual sources of food are less abundant.  He invited us to help him with his morning jo, showing the children a bucket filled with wheat which had been grown and harvested on the farm and which was to be sprinkled on the ground for the birds to eat.

On our walk up to the wood we observed the effects of the cold weather, noticing frost on the ground, the hedges and the tree branches - it was a beautiful sight!  As many of the trees have lost their leaves we were able to clearly see birds nests that had previously been hidden, we even spotted some squirrel nests too! 

We also jumped in muddy puddles, found animal footprints in the mud, made dens and investigated where the badgers have extended their own den (set) in ‘Badger Land’.