This week the children have learned what the word portrait means as they worked very hard with Mrs Nelson and myself to paint their very own self-portraits to put on display outside our classroom. The children looked very carefully in the mirrors to work out what features to include in their portrait, and they had to think carefully about how to mix the right colour paint to match these. Everyone's painting is now proudly on display outside our classroom along with some very interesting quotes from the children about their favourite things! We hope that this will be a lovely introduction to us for all the people who visit the Transition classroom. 

We have also discussed how to be a kind friend this week and the children came up with some fantastic ideas including; sharing toys, using gentle hands, and giving our friend a cuddle. The children worked together as a team to create a fantastic poster, sorting kind and unkind things we could do for our friends and everyone knew which were the right things to do! We have earned lots of stars for our star jar this week by using kind words, taking turns and working together as a team. Great work Transition! After discussing how to be a kind friend, we made friendship bracelets for each other, practising our fine motor skills as we threaded the beads onto string. We also made friendship potions using rice, pasta and seeds, thinking carefully about the different ingredients we needed to include. The children made some fantastic friendship potions for each other with lots of love, kindness and certainly no mean!

In maths this week, we have been exploring odd and even numbers. One of the children noticed that the date on our class calendar was an odd number: 13. Some of the other children were curious what an odd number was so we used our Numicon shapes to explore! We learned that all of the even numbers have a friend they can stand with, but all of the odd numbers are on their own. The children then helped me to sort all of the numbers out into odd and even and they did a super job! 

We also had a play-dough disco this week to help us warm up our fingers and strengthen our growing muscles. We first had to warm up each finger by giving them a wiggle in the air. Some of our fingers were a bit tricky to wiggle, especially Ruby Ring, but everyone had a fantastic try, then it was ready for our disco! We had to roll, squeeze, poke and splat our playdough creating lots of different shapes. 

In phonics this week, we have been listening to body percussion, thinking about how we can use our bodies to make different sounds. We took it in turns to create different sounds with our bodies for our friends to copy, including clapping our hands, stomping our feet and patting our knees. The children loved coming up with their own patterns and watching their friends to see if they were getting it right. It has also been very exciting for our older children this week as they have begun their phonics lessons in Form 1 with Mrs Cooper! The children excitedly came back into Transition on Tuesday telling me how they had been superstars and had learned the sound s. They were eager to tell everyone all about their new learning, and excitedly told us lots of words beginning with the s sound. 

It has been lovely to watch the children settle further into Transition and to see their confidence grow as they continue to explore their classroom. This week we have been busy building rockets and castles in the junk modelling, putting on shows and role-playing as police and firefighters catching all of the bad guys to keep us safe! What a busy week!