What Early Years got up to this week

PRE-RECEPTION

As part of our topic community heroes, the children have been learning about the school bus and their drivers.  We have transformed our home corner into a bus waiting room and the children have been using their mark making and emergent writing skills to make their own bus tickets. They have also enjoyed taking turns to drive the ‘bus’ whilst singing the wheels on the bus. We had a visit from a Paramedic this week and the children had fun trying on the uniform.  

MATHS

In Maths, we have been learning about the number 2. The children have counted out two sweets from a larger group to decorate biscuits with, subitised (said how many without counting) 2; both in dice patterns and irregular patterns.  

PHONICS

In Phonics, we have worked hard on pronouncing the ‘t’ phoneme (sound). We have used the rhyme ‘open your mouth, put the tip of your tongue behind your teeth and press t t t’, to help them with this. 

NEXT WEEK

Next week we will continue to work on number 2 in Maths. The children will use 1 to 1 correspondence (assigning a number to each item counted in order) to count 2, learn the numeral 2 and match 2 objects to the numeral 2.  

We will begin work on the phoneme (sound) ‘p’ and learn how to pronounce this purely; we will identify words that have the ‘p’ phoneme as their initial sound (peg, pin, pig, etc).  

In our topic work, we will visit the School Groundsmen and learn about their tractor and how important it is for their work.   

RECEPTION

We have had another busy and exciting week in Reception learning about community heroes.

Literacy

As we continued our theme on community heroes, we focused on the amazing work that Paramedics and Vets do. We were extremely fortunate to have a visit from a Paramedic, who talked to the children about her job and brought in some of her uniform for them to try on.

Before her visit, in class, we prepared in class by learning about what her role involves and writing questions to ask her. We discussed how questions help us find out more information. Then, when she arrived, the children confidently asked their questions and deepened their understanding of how Paramedics help us.

Maths

This week we also continued exploring the composition of numbers 1 to 5. Children consolidated their understanding that numbers are made up of smaller parts and talked confidently about the parts they could see. It is important for them to recognise that these smaller numbers can be combined to make a whole.

Phonics

Finally, this week we learned the phonemes: z, qu, ch. We also explored words ending with –s.  We practised:

• Saying the sounds aloud
• Blending the sounds to read words (e.g. v-e-t)
• Writing the letters using cursive formation

In addition, we introduced the tricky words: go, no, to, into. Tricky words are those that cannot be easily decoded (sounded out) and therefore children need to be recognise them by sight.

Find out more about Early Years here.