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

Pre-Reception

This week, we have been learning about the School’s Catering Team as part of our Community Heroes topic. We were lucky enough to be able to take the children to meet them in the school kitchen. The children asked many questions and had the opportunity to decorate biscuits. We also read the story ‘Oliver’s Milkshake’ and decided to make our own! Together we wrote down the recipe and then followed the instructions. The milkshakes were extremely delicious!  

In Maths, we have been working on simple two-step repeating patterns (colour, size, shape, sound and movement).

In Phonics, we have taught the children to recognise the ‘i’ phoneme (sound) and to pronounce this correctly. We have used the phrase, ‘Pull your lips back and make the i sound at the back of your mouth.’ 

Reception

Literacy    

The children were extremely excited this week to write letters to Santa. We started by talking about the key features of a letter. We then used our phonic skills and best handwriting to write our letters to Santa. On Thursday we walked to the post box and posted them off. We cannot wait to receive our responses from him. We also enjoyed exploring the story The Jolly Postman by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. The story follows the adventure of the Jolly Postman as he delivers letters around fairy land. 

Maths    

This week we continued to explore numbers 4 and 5 in greater depth. We looked at the composition of both numbers. We experimented with counters and a five frame to see all the different ways the numbers could be made. We then talked about what we could see and recorded our findings as number sentences in our math books.  

For example 

2 + 3 = 5 

3 + 2 = 5 

4 + 1 = 5 

We also looked at how this could be represented on a whole-part-whole model.  

Phonics    

We have had another busy week in phonics. We introduced 4 new digraphs. A digraph is a grapheme using two letters to represent one phoneme. With children, we frequently reinforce it with the mantra ‘two letters, one sound.’