What Early Years got up to this week

PRE-RECEPTION

We have had another very busy week in Pre-Reception.  

We had great fun on Thursday celebrating World Book Day. The children all looked fantastic in their outfits. Our chosen book, in Pre-Reception, was ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’. We have been sequencing the events, counting the fruits and creating our story jars. The children have made a caterpillar and a butterfly to decorate the outside of the jar. We had great fun creating all the items of food he ate to fill the jar.   

Phonics

In Phonics, we have taught the children to pronounce the sound ‘h’ phoneme (sound) using the rhyme ‘open your mouth and breathe out sharply h’. 

MATHS

In Maths, we have introduced length and height. We have taught the children the key vocabulary ‘short’, ‘shorter’, ‘tall’, ‘taller’, ‘long’ and ‘longer’. For extra challenge, we have also taught them ‘shortest’, ‘longest’ and ‘tallest’.   

pshe

In our Jigsaw PSHE lesson we thought about food that is healthy and food that is not so healthy. 

RECEPTION

This week has been a ‘blooming’ busy week across Reception. The children have really immersed themselves into our new ‘growth and growing’ topic.   

Understanding the World

Continuing the theme of growth in plants, we have been exploring what plants need to grow. We learnt the name and function for different parts of a plant, including leaves, stem, roots, flowers and petals.  

Literacy

In literacy we drew plants and learnt how to label them. We then thought about what plants need to grow and recorded this in sentences. We challenged the children to think of full sentences using a range of vocabulary learnt throughout the week.   

Phonics

This week we reviewed Phase 3 phonemes: ‘er’ and ‘air,’ words with double letters and longer words. We also revisited a selection of tricky words in phase 2 and 3. We practised reading and writing dictated sentences containing these sounds, for example, “He has muffins for dinner.” 

Maths

This week continued our learning in the block ‘building 9 and 10’. We explored number composition, one more, one less and doubling with 10. We revisited the part-part-whole model. The children had to select a number to put into the ‘whole’ part of the model. They then counted out the correct number of blocks and placed them in different arrangements between the two ‘parts’ of the model. Finally, they recorded this as number sentences.  

PSED  

This term we started our new Jigsaw unit ‘healthy me’. This unit focuses on being and keeping safe and healthy. In this week’s session, we played the bean game. Once we had finished, we thought about how they are feeling. We felt our hearts and discussed what was happening. We thought about how our breathing and skin felt. Finally, we discussed why it was important to exercise. 

World Book Day

The children thoroughly enjoyed celebrating World Book Day on Thursday. The children enjoyed parading their costumes off during a special assembly. Each year group created ‘Story Jars’ on a chosen book. In Reception we chose Jack and the Beanstalk, linked to this term’s topic. During the week we planted beans in our jars. We then created beanstalk using a stick and winding pipe cleaners around it. We used our imagination and creative skills to create a castle and finally used our cutting skills to add characters to the finished product. 

Find out more about Early Years here.