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

Pre-Reception

This term’s topic is ‘animals’ and we will be learning about the historic animals’ dinosaurs. On returning to school, the children were excited to discover a nest with giant eggs and even mysterious footsteps.  These ‘hooks’ excited the children and sparked lots of conversation; something we really value in Pre-Reception.  

In Literacy, we have introduced our key text ‘Gigantosaurus’. The children looked at the front cover and described what they noticed. Together, we worked out that the book was about dinosaurs, and it was set in the jungle. The children have designed their own front covers for a dinosaur book, drawn and described their own dinosaur character and looked at the onomatopoeia words (words that sounds like the word it describes) in the book and used instruments to recreate the sounds. We also explored friendships as a link to our Jigsaw PSHE theme of ‘relationships’ through drama.  

In Maths, we have learnt about sequencing through nursery rhymes, morning and evening routines and Eric Carle’s ‘The Hungry Caterpillar’. We have focused on using our key vocabulary ‘first’, ‘next’, ‘then’, ‘after that’ and ‘finally’ to describe the order in which things happen.

In Phonics, we have learnt the phoneme (sound) ‘v’. This is quite a challenging sound for the children to make and we have used mirrors for the children to check if they have their teeth in the correct place to annunciate the sound. We have taught them the rhyme “put your teeth against your bottom lip and make a buzzing sound vvvvv” to support them.

This term’s Jigsaw PSHE ‘puzzle’ is ‘relationships’ and this week we have thought about our families and how they are all different and special. 

Reception

This week we started a new top ‘amazing animals.’ We children started the week by sharing their amazing animal fact file posters. The children really enjoyed sharing their knowledge, drawings and models with the rest of the class. We even learnt a few new facts!  

Understanding the World    
We have been focusing on the life cycle of frogs this week. We learnt about each stage of the cycle as well as facts linked to that stage. The children then had the opportunity to look at some real tadpoles. They will remain in the class for the next few weeks so we can observe any changes.  

Literacy 
The children applied their fact knowledge to write full sentences about each stage of the frog life cycle. We encouraged them to start each stage with a different connective. We then challenged them to add a fact about that stage. 

Phonics   
This week we started Phase 4 in phonics. During this phase we will be learning 18 new tricky words and focusing on short vowel words, compound words and longer words.  

This week we learnt the tricky words ‘said, so, have, like.’ We read longer sentences and the children wrote dictated sentences, such as ‘I have lost my belt by the pond.’ If they completed their sentences correctly, we challenged them to use one of the spellings from that session in a full sentence.  

Maths    
This week we started a new topic ‘to 20 and beyond.’ We have been exploring numbers between 10- 100. We have looked at how many ‘tens’ and how many ‘ones’ are in the number. We have then used our previously taught knowledge to think about how these numbers could be made.