Play dough!
The children are really enjoying the self-serve play dough area where they can follow a recipe and make their own play dough! A few children have asked to take their play dough home so here is a recipe if you’d like to make it at home:
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup water
- 1/4 cup salt
- 2 cups flour
- food colouring
Method
Mix together the ingredients – simple!
Play dough is a fantastic way to support your child’s fine motor skill development and also for imaginative play.
World book day
I’m sure many children were disappointed today when they couldn’t come to school in their book day costumes! Therefore, we have decided to re-schedule World Book Day to Monday 05 March. Your child can come to school as their favourite book character – just as was planned for today. We’d also like to invite parents to stay and read with their child at school drop off from 8.50-9.20am.
If your child is swimming on Monday, please bring some clothes that will be easier for them to change into after swimming.
Snow!
We hope your child is enjoying the snow outside. Extreme weather changes like this can initiate interesting conversations about the world around us. It would be great to hear what your child has been talking about whilst playing in the snow. This would be a fantastic opportunity for us to gain a holistic view of your child’s understanding of the world around them. Photos and your child’s direct quotes can be emailed to: scholesf2@spherefederation.org. Please don’t worry if they’re not grammatically correct – we want to hear what your child has said.
We’re looking forward to hearing what your child has been up to in all of the snow! Have fun!
Marvellous Maths
We’ve been working really hard counting in multiples of 2, 5 and 10. This is an important first step in learning all our multiplication and division facts (the expectation is for all facts up to 12 x 12 to be known by the end of Year 4).
Help your child at home by looking for arrays, equal groups of things, counting in different ways, reciting times tables facts or using one of the BBC Supermovers multiplication dance songs.
We use concrete examples, pictorial representations and abstract calculations. Some examples can be seen below.
Littering
A child in Foundation class found a piece of rubbish on the floor whilst in the playground. We were very impressed when he chose to pick it up and put it in the bin. This started a class conversation about littering and how to look after our environment. We talked about why we need to put rubbish in the bin.
- “Someone could slip on it and break their bones.”
- “The animals might eat it and be sick. The animals might give it to babies and then they could eat it and die.”
We talked about what to do with our own rubbish and what we could do if we saw rubbish on the floor.
- “Put it in the bin!”
- “Pick it up!”
We also talked about keeping ourselves safe if we did see rubbish on the floor. The children decided they could ask an adult if it was safe to pick up litter and put it in the bin.
After talking about littering, we decided to write posters to remind people to put rubbish in the bin.
We then went to speak to other classes in the school to share what we had discussed and give each class a poster to remind people to put rubbish in the bin.
We were very impressed with Foundation’s mature understanding of how to look after our environment!
World Book Day
This afternoon, the Y6 children visited F2 to share stories. The children were put into pairs and then chose a story to read together. First the F2 children listened to a story read by the Year 6 children and then the F2 children read one of our Biff, Chip and Kipper stories to them. The F2 children enjoyed reading to the older children.
We are looking forward to welcoming parents/carers to our third stay and play session (stay and read) on Thursday 01 March 8.50am – 9.20am or 2.45pm – 3.15pm.
The children are very excited about coming to school dressed as their favourite story book character. We (the Foundation 2 staff) will also be dressing up as characters from a storybook.
Living and Learning
As part of our focus on manners, we’ve been trying to use the ‘vampire method’. I cover my mouth (when I cough, sneeze or yawn) was our Living and Learning statement last week so we looked at why this method can help to prevent germs spreading. By coughing or sneezing into our elbow, germs are not spread into the air or on our hands which may contaminate other things. The germs dry out and die quicker on fabric than on hands or hard surfaces.
This week we explored the statement I can say something good about myself. We talked in pairs about what we were good at, said what we were good at and drew a picture too.
An exciting discovery…
Week 1 – An exciting discovery…
We had a very chilly start to the week! Thankfully, the engineers were able to get the parts they needed to fix our boiler as quickly as possible. When we returned to nursery on Wednesday, children made a very exciting discovery in our nursery garden. There appeared to be three egg-like objects that had appeared since Monday. After much discussion, the children decided they were eggs and that we needed to help them to hatch. We talked about what the eggs would need and children found things to keep them warm and safe. After a few days waiting, the eggs finally hatched on Friday (with some keen, small hands to help them!). It was great to see how excited the children were and it provoked many questions… What did dinosaur eggs look like? How big were they? What other animals come from eggs? Are these eggs real? What does extinct mean?
We investigated the shape and size of dinosaur footprints by making ‘fossils’ in salt dough and drawing a life sized footprint of an Aptosaur. To find out just how big it was, we put ALL of our shoes inside it and counted them!
Week 2 – What are we learning this week?
This week, we’ll enjoy reading our favourite stories and we’ll celebrate World Book Day on Thursday. We hope to see lots of parents and carers in the morning to join us for our ‘Stay and Read’ session from 8.30-9.10. There will be different story-telling activities in nursery for you to take part in with your child, including re-telling the story of ‘What the Ladybird Heard’, making gingerbread men in the playdough and mixing porridge for the Three Bears in our sensory area. Please remember children can dress up, but please help us by choosing characters that are not superheroes. As you can imagine, a nursery full of Spidermen and his friends can become quite lively!
We also have some very EGGciting news… We won’t share it with you just yet, but hopefully the children will tell you all about it this week.
In phonics, we are learning to hear the initial sounds in words. Silly Sidney Snake is introducing us to letter sounds using Jolly Phonics songs and actions. We have learnt ‘d‘ for dinosaur and ‘s‘ for Stegosaurus. This week, we’ll be learning about the letter ‘a‘. You can click on each link to hear the Jolly Phonics song and see a picture/video with the action that children will learn to associate with each sound. For example, ‘Sssss’ is a snake slithering through the grass. At this point in nursery, children are learning to hear the sound and may begin to recognise the letter, rather than focussing on how to write the letters.
Home Link – World Book Day
On Thursday, it is World Book Day.
- What is your child’s favourite story?
- Who is their favourite character?
Please bring in your favourite stories for us to read at group time (don’t forget to write names in!).
You could also:
- Visit the library or a book shop
- Read your favourite story together
- Draw/paint/collage a picture of the story or a character
- Re-tell the story using props
If you’d like a few ideas for new books to read, you could visit the World Book Day website.
Look out for our ‘Reading’ information booklet at the Stay and Play or in folders later this week.
Askham Bryan Wildlife and Conservation Park
On Friday, year 5/6 visited Askham Bryan Wildlife and Conservation Park. We had a brilliant time learning about classification and evolution.
