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

Pre-Reception

It was British Science Week this week and this year’s theme was ‘time’. In Pre-Reception we have thought about how we have changed over time and have also taken part in the British Science Week ‘changing apples’ exploration. The children were provided with a selection of varieties of apples and explored them with their senses. We encouraged them to sniff, look at, taste and feel the apples and describe their similarities and differences. They compared the apples' heights, widths and even measured their circumferences with string. After cutting the apples, we examined the pips before popping the cores into bags to observe how they change once cut. They also made predictions about how they will change over different amounts of time (minutes, hours, days). All these activities help unlock the scientific skills of observation and patience. 

We have also introduced another small group activity called ‘story dough!’. Story dough is a chance to 'book snuggle' with small groups of children, to spend quality time with them exploring stories, showing them the joy of manipulating play dough, sprinkling vocabulary, connecting mark making with positive emotion and above all going on an adventure with them into imagination and make-believe - all the things that childhood is looking for and the perfect opportunity to bring skills to life. The children have all enjoyed taking part in this activity and made fabulous play dough ‘garden robots’ and invented rockets for the robot to reach Errol’s roof garden. After drawing a magic coded button, the children pressed it, and the robot was able to shrink to fit into their rockets!

In Phonics, we have learnt how to pronounce the sound ‘f’. We have taught the children the rhyme ‘open your lips a little; put your teeth on your bottom lip and push the air out to make the sound fffff.’

In Maths we have explored mass. The children have learnt to use balance scales and are beginning to use the key vocabulary ‘heavy’, ‘heavier’, ‘light’ and ‘lighter’ to compare the weights of different objects. We made our own balance scales using coat hangers, string, and cups. The children also enjoyed making ‘balance scale cakes’ and we are sure they will enjoy eating them too! 

In our Jigsaw PSHE lesson we learnt about how important a bedtime routine is to help us get our all-important sleep. We spoke about the different bedtime routines that the children have. We listened to lullabies, had a ‘bedtime’ story, and noticed how relaxed they made us feel.

Reception

We have another fun and interesting week in Reception.

Understanding the World   
This week we have been exploring ‘how we stay healthy.’ We learnt that you need a balanced diet, exercise, we need to keep ourselves clean to keep ourselves healthy. We also learnt that it is important to talk to adults about how we feel.  Linked to our topic and our leaning on healthy eating, the children made healthy fruit kebabs this week. They looked at different fruits, exploring the texture and how they tasted.

Literacy
In literacy we thought about our learning this week and recorded sentences in our literacy book on how to stay healthy. Throughout the week we also completed different healthy eating tasks that involved using our phonic knowledge to label pictures.

Phonics   
This week we focused on longer words, words ending in –ing and compound words. In class we have been practising read and writing sentences, for example ‘It is fun chatting and singing in the rooftop garden.’ We have also revisited tricky words from phase 2 and 3.  

Maths   
In Maths we have started a new block ‘exploring shape.’ We learnt the names and properties of 3D shapes. We have also been revisiting our learning in the block ‘building 9 and 10,’ by exploring true and false statements for example ‘Mrs Harry says that she has 5 cakes and Mrs Frisby has 4 cakes, that means there are 10 cakes in total.’ We have been encouraging the children to work out the answer and explain if the statement is true or false, and how they know.