What Early Years got up to this week in the Prep School

Pre-Reception

As part of our topic ‘Community Heroes’, the children have been learning about the school bus and their drivers. We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to meet with Mr Grima who told the children about his job and the children were able to sit on one of the buses. Mr Grima allowed them to sit in the driver’s seat and even let some of them ‘honk’ the horn! They really enjoyed this activity! 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’. 

Our new book Car Car Truck Jeep has been a hit, and the children are beginning to join in with rhyming words, created actions to verbs and they were fascinated to learn about hovercrafts!

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 and subitised 2 (said how many without counting).

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. 
 

Reception

Literacy  
This week we returned to our theme: community heroes. We have learnt all about the role of a Vet, all the different roles people work as within a hospital and about Police Officers. On Friday we got to meet two Police Officers, they came into class and talked all about their jobs, they brought in clothing for us to try on and showed us some of the equipment they use.  

Maths  
In Maths, we started a new module: circles and triangles. We introduced the children to the mathematical language for describing the properties of circles and triangles, such as sides, straight, corners and round. The children learnt that triangles are flat shapes with three straight sides and three corners, and that circles are flat shapes which are perfectly round. We also explored positional language.

Expressive Arts and Design 
Linked to our learning in Maths, the children have been busy using their scissors skills to cut and create pictures using circles and triangles. 

Phonics  
This week we learnt the phonemes v, w, x and y. In class we practised saying the sounds, blending the sounds together to read words, for example f-o-x. We then practised letter formation by writing out the letters cursively. We also learnt the tricky words and, has, his and her. We continued to read short captions and as an extra challenge we practised writing them.

Personal, Social and Emotional Development
This term we started a new module in Jigsaw: celebrating differences. During this week’s session we discussed what we like to do and what we are good at. Everybody had their own ideas and we discussed how this makes us all different.