Early Years Playground

What Early Years got up to this week

Pre-Reception pupil

PRE-RECEPTION

LITERACY

This week, we have been reading the story ‘Stick Man’ by Julia Donaldson. The children have made their own stick characters and made-up stories to act out.  

ART

The children have learnt about the abstract artist Piet Mondrian and have enjoyed creating their own responses to his paintings. They learnt that paintings do not have to be of recognisable objects and that abstract artists use shape, colour and texture in their creations.  

MATHS

In Maths, we have continued to learn about the number 2. We have focused on 1:1 correspondence when counting 2 objects (assigning a number to each item counted in order), learnt to recognise and write the numeral 2 and matched 2 objects to the numeral 2. We have taught the phrase, ‘start at the top, round and down and across the base’ to help the children to form their numeral 2 correctly. We have also looked at repeating patterns, using both shapes and colours.  

PHONICS

In Phonics, we have taught the children to recognise the ‘p’ phoneme (sound) and to pronounce this correctly. We have used the phrase ‘bring your lips together and push them open and say p p p’. 

RECEPTION

We have had another busy and exciting week in Reception. 

Literacy 

As we have continued our theme ‘Community Heroes, we have learnt about the many different roles of people who work within hospitals. We encouraged the children to think about people who were behind the scenes and keep hospitals clean and patients fed. We also had a visit from a nurse and the children thought of questions to ask her.  

Maths 

This week, we continued exploring the composition of numbers 1 to 5. Children consolidate their understanding of numbers being made up of smaller numbers and confidently talking about the parts they can see. It is important to understand that these smaller numbers can be combined to make the whole. The children were given practical opportunities to partition numbers into two parts, in a range of contexts. We also explored ‘one more’ and ‘one less’ within 5. 

Phonics  

This week we learnt the phonemes ‘sh, th, ng and nk’. In class we practiced saying the sounds, blending the sounds together to read words, for example ‘m-e-ss’. We then practiced letter formation by writing out the letters cursively. We also learnt the tricky words ‘go,’ ‘he,’ ‘of’ and ‘she’. This week we started to read short captions and as an extra challenge we practiced writing them. 

Find out more about the Early Years Department here.

Pre-Reception pupil Pre-Reception pupil

 

Boarding - weekend life

Ever wondered what our boarders get up to on the weekends? After classes wrap up on Friday, the fun is just beginning. Watch our video to see what makes our weekends so special.

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