What Early Years got up to this week

PRE-RECEPTION

The children had a fantastic trip to Wingham Wildlife Park last Friday. They were excited to see chimpanzees, various breeds of monkeys, exotic birds, minibeasts and flamingos. They howled at the Artic wolf and were surprised by a baboon who banged loudly on the glass at them! The children’s listening skills were exceptional in the two workshops provided by the Park; one on life cycles and the other on animal adaptions. We were very proud of them.   

Today, Pre-Reception had some special visitors. The Key Stage 1 chicks came over for a playdate. The children were incredibly careful with the chicks and enjoyed watching them run around.  

MATHS

In Maths, we have revisited the 3D shapes, cubes, cuboids, cylinders, and spheres. The children find remembering theses names quite challenging. We encouraged the children to use mathematical language to describe the properties of these shapes, as follows: 

• Flat 

• Curved 

• Face (side) 

• Surface (spheres and cylinders) 

• Edges (where two faces meet) 

• Vertices (rather than corners) 

 PHONICS

In Phonics, we introduced the phoneme (sound) ‘ch’. You can hear this pure sound pronounced correctly at 37 seconds on the following Little Wandle link. 

RECEPTION

Wingham Wildlife Park

We are sure that the children have told you all about our fantastic trip to Wingham Wildlife Park last Friday. They were excited to see chimpanzees, various breeds of monkeys, exotic birds, minibeasts and flamingos. They howled at the Artic wolf and were surprised by a baboon who banged loudly on the glass at them! The children’s listening skills were exceptional in the two workshops provided by the Park; one on life cycles and the other on animal adaptions. We were very proud of them.

Expressive Arts and Design

We have been very creative this week using lots of the skills we have been learning to create minibeasts in preparation for the Luceat Exhibition next Friday. We do not want to give too much away but think you will be impressed with the completed products.

Literacy

Following on from last week’s learning about butterfly life cycles, this week we immersed ourselves into the ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ book by Eric Carle. We started the week by familiarising ourselves with the story. Next, we created a class story map. The children have begun rewriting the story, using our class story map to remind themselves of story and key vocabulary, tricky word and sound mats.

Mandarin

The children have been having Mandarin lessons this term and are working on simple greetings and counting to ten.

Phonics

This week we continued with Phase 4. We read and wrote sentences that contain longer and compound words that contain Phase 4 blends such as ‘The second chimpanzee got a present’. 

Find out more about Early Years here.