What Early Years got up to this week

PRE-RECEPTION

We had a wonderful week in Pre-Reception. We were impressed by the children’s engagement in child initiated play and witnessed some fantastic imaginative play. The children enjoyed our stories from the Australian Dreamtime. They used props to help them to retell the stories, using key vocabulary and actions from the story. They are also beginning to use positional language to explain where the different animals were found in the stories.  

MATHS

In Maths, we have started to explore the composition of 4. Through explorative play, the children are beginning to understand the concept that larger numbers are made up of smaller numbers.  For example, 4 can be made up of 4+0, 3+1, 2+2, 1+3 and 0+4. They have investigated this concept by changing the colours of four spots on Lila the ladybird. We also had a ‘sports day’; the children threw four beanbags and counted how many landed in or outside of a hoop and played skittles, counting how many of the four skittles they managed to knock down. We have taught the children how to record their findings by making a tally chart.  

PHONICS

In Phonics, we have taught the children to pronounce the sound ‘c’ (as in cat or kitten) phoneme (sound) using the rhyme ‘open your mouth into a little smile; make your tongue flat and move it up towards the top of your mouth to say c c c ’.

Next week we will learn to pronounce ‘e’. We will also start to encourage the children to listen carefully to the start of words and see if they can identify the initial sound – even if it is not the focus sound of the week.   

PSHE

The children had great fun in our Jigsaw PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) lesson. This ‘puzzle piece’ was entitled ‘flight to the future’. We imagined that we were on a rocket to the future and, when we landed on ‘planet grown- up’, the children chose an occupation card and acted out that occupation. We have some very confident actors in the cohort. Next week, in our final ‘piece’ of our ‘dreams and goals puzzle’, we will celebrate the children’s achievements in accomplishing their goals. 

RECEPTION

What a busy, fun filled week we have had in Reception! 

Understanding the World

This week we continued to enjoy learning about China. We learnt about the climate, the animals that lived there and famous landmarks. We also flew across the ocean to Australia where we learnt about the animals and habitats such as the Great Barrier Reef.  

Literacy

In Literacy we consolidated our learning of China. Independently children thought of and recorded their own facts about the county. The children particularly enjoyed learning about pandas and wrote facts about their appearance, their habitat and diet.  

Phonics

We have now learnt all the phonemes for Reception. This week we practised reading longer words. We used the chunking method when you sound words with more than one syllable. For example, ‘sunset’ and ‘laptop’. We continued to use our phonic knowledge to write sentences. For example, ‘I can see the cow in the farmyard.’ 

We revisited all the tricky words taught so far. It is important to practise reading and writing the phonemes at home. Some children are finding it tricky to apply the sounds they can hear, in their writing.  

Find out more about Early Years here.