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

Reception

We have been busy bees in Hedgehog class this week.  

Understanding the World    
Continuing with our topic ‘amazing animals’ we moved our learning onto exploring bees and spiders. On Tuesday we had a visit from a beekeeper. We learnt lots of facts about bees, tried on beekeeper suits, looked through ‘bee goggles’ and learnt the ‘waggle dance.’  

The children were very excited this week when our butterflies emerged from their cocoons. We spent a day looking at the beautiful patterns on their wings and watching them closely before taking them to the outdoor classroom and releasing them. 

Literacy 
The children continued re-writing their versions of ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar.’ We have had some very interesting versions, including ‘The very hungry dog,’ The very hungry ladybird,’ and ‘The very hungry caterpillar.’ During independent writing tasks the children wrote facts they had learnt about bees.  

Phonics   
This week we started Phase 4 in phonics.  This week we learnt the tricky words ‘there when what, one’ This week we concentrated on longer words and compound words. We read sentences, and the children wrote dictated sentences, such as ‘The shampoo smells like blossom.’ 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 block ‘manipulate, compose and decompose.’ In this block we build on the children's prior knowledge of selecting shapes for a purpose by further exploring the properties of shapes and spatial relations. We explored and experimented with rotating shapes and moving them to create bigger shapes.