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

Pre-Reception

We have had a fabulous week in Pre-Reception and it has been exceptionally busy! The children have continued to embrace learning about dinosaurs. This week we have learnt about herbivores. We have had some fantastic dinosaur posters and are continuing to encourage the children to describe the different features of the dinosaurs and think about why they might have had these features. We were very impressed by the language and vocabulary used by some of the children. The children have also designed their own dinosaur eggs to add to our dinosaur land display. 

In Maths, we have used the traditional tale ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’ to teach the children the positional language ‘on’, ‘over’ and ‘under’. Using dinosaur small worlds, we have also taught the children the key vocabulary ‘in front’, ‘next to’ and behind. Mrs Fitzpatrick introduced her favourite game ‘Everywhere Bear’. The children closed their eyes whilst Mrs Fitzpatrick hid the Everywhere Bear; the children used the positional language to describe where she had placed him. Afterwards, they had great fun playing this in small groups. We have also explored positional language playing active games such as ‘hide from the T-Rex' in which children hid herbivores around the setting and the child with the T-Rex had to find them following their friend’s instructions. 

‘In Phonics, we have learnt the phoneme (sound) ‘w’. This is another challenging pure sound for the children to make as they instinctively say ‘wer’.

Reception

We have had a busy week in Reception exploring life cycles and learning facts about them

Understanding the World   
This week we learnt about the life cycles of butterflies and ladybirds. We compared the similarities and differences between the different life cycles. As we discussed each stage, we learnt additional facts about that stage.  

This week we also welcomed 5 tiny caterpillars into the classroom. We are very excited to follow their journey and watch them grow into butterflies. We will keep you posted on their development.  

The children were very excited to see that some of our tadpoles have started to grow their back legs.

Literacy
The children applied their fact knowledge to write full sentences about each stage of the butterfly lifecycle. We encouraged them to think of their own sentence, say the sentence and then write it. We asked them to check if it was a good sentence by reading it back.

Phonics   
This week we started Phase 4 in phonics.  This week we learnt the tricky words ‘some, come, love and do.’ We concentrated on short vowels CVCC CCVC words. We read longer sentences and the children wrote dictated sentences, such as ‘Bring me the truck so I can plug it in’ 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 continued with our new topic ‘to 20 and beyond.’ We have been exploring numbers between 10- 100. We have continued to explore how many ‘tens’ and how many ‘ones’ are in the number. They children are becoming more confident in this now.  

We continued to look at how teen numbers can be made. For example: 13 can be made by 10 + 3. Then using our number bond to 10 knowledge we will know that 13 can also be made...

1 + 9+ 3 = 13

2 + 8+ 3 = 13

3 + 7+ 3 = 13

4 + 6 + 3 = 13

5 + 5 + 3 = 13