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

Pre-Reception

What a busy first week back we have had! 

The children have loved learning about our new topic ‘planting and growing’. We have introduced the traditional tale ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ into our literacy lessons to support our topic. Through this book, we have talked about meeting strangers and making good choices, learnt that snails and slugs are ‘pests’ for a gardener, looked at wormeries and worm compost and taken part in some drama activities. We even had a giant beanstalk appear in the woodpecker classroom! We have also started to grow bean and cress seeds under different conditions and the children have predicted which ones they think will grow faster and taller. 

In Phonics, we have taught the children to pronounce the sound ‘r’ phoneme (sound) using the rhyme ‘show me your teeth to make a rrrr sound rrrrr’.

In Maths, we have continued to work on the cardinal principle (understanding that the final number they say when counting in order is the whole amount) and composition of number. We have encouraged the children to use sentences to discuss the amounts. Our focus this week was the number 5. For example, “There are 3 red counters and 2 blue counters. There are 5 altogether.” 

In our Jigsaw PSHE lesson we discussed and named some of the different parts of our bodies using the song ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’.

Reception

Understanding the World   
The new term means an exciting new topic. This term we are exploring ‘growth’. We started by exploring growth in plants. We focused on planting seeds.

Literacy
In literacy we have been exploring writing instructions. First, we learnt how to plant a seed. We thought about the process and broke it down into stages. We then used ‘bossy’ language to write instructions.

Phonics   
This week we reviewed Phase 3 phonemes: ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, oo, ow, oi, and ear. We also revisited a selection of tricky words in phase 2 and 3. We practised reading and writing dictated sentence containing these sounds, for example ‘We put the rabbit down on the carpet’.