Fee, fi, fo, fum…
Week 4 – “Fee, Fi, Fo, fum…”
Last week, we enjoyed listening to the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. Children used props to re-tell the story using different voices for the giant and using some of the repeated refrains from the story. In group times, children practised counting the giant’s golden coins. We carefully counted each coin once and tried to use our counting fingers, to say one number per coin. Keep practising your counting skills at home! Some children are finding it quite tricky to count out a set number of objects from a bigger group. For example, we were trying to take just 3 coins from the Giant’s money chest which was filled with coins. It’s quite a difficult skill to master, so you could continue to work on this at home. (Can you get 3 sweets from the bowl? Can you get 4 cars from the box? Put 3 animals in the field…)
On Monday, many of the children had remembered putting some balloons filled with water into the freezer before the weekend. They were keen to find out what had happened to them and were very excited to discover that the soft and ‘squidgy’ balloons were now hard, and very cold. It was quite tricky to get our mini icebergs out of the balloons but when we did, there were lots of conversations about the process of freezing and melting.
Even though we play outside in all weathers, sadly, the rain and wind got the better of us last week and we had to stay inside for some of the morning. However, it provided an excellent opportunity for us to get rid of some of our excess energy singing and dancing. We made our own stage to perform on and we learnt some new movement songs.
We also noticed an interest in dinosaurs…
Week 5 – What are we learning this week?
You might hear a lot of ROARING when you come in to nursery this week as we begin to add more dinosaur-themed activities in response to children’s interests last week. So, to build upon this popular interest, we’re going to create our own dinosaur landscape in our small world area using non-fiction books to help us find out about where dinosaurs lived. We will be reading dinosaur stories, building Jeeps in construction and counting dinosaurs in the swamp. Watch this space to see where our dinosaur interests take us!
We’ll also look at the letter ‘d’ and find objects that start with a ‘d’ sound. We’ll be playing eye-spy games to identify the initial sound in words, spotting the odd one out (e.g. objects beginning with d) and continuing to identify rhyming words in stories and rhymes.
Wonderful Writing!
This week in writing, the children have been using conjunctions, even though and although, both at the beginning and in the middle of sentences. For our extended writing task, we rewrote one of the chapters from Akimbo and the Elephants (our class novel), trying to include these conjunctions and use ambitious vocabulary. Here are examples by William and Ruqayyah – well done!
Be reading ready!
We hope your child is enjoying the opportunity to use their reading journals, which were sent home a couple of weeks ago. Although we set a target page for their group reading book, children should feel free to read further. Children should be using their journals to capture their thoughts about what they have read.
Here are some ideas of how to use your journal:
- word banks
- summaries
- questions about the character/ text/ plot
- predictions
- labelled diagrams from descriptions
- reviews
- author fact files
- lists of books read
- lists of new vocabulary
- glossaries
- lists of impressive words
Pure sounds!
A number of parents have been asking how to pronounce the ‘pure’ sounds when reading with their children. We also teach the children the letter name. However, the ‘pure’ sound helps children to segment and blend words when reading.
Here are the pure sounds pronounced by Mrs Flynn and the actions shown by Miss Eckersley! Can you get your child to show you at home?
We are now working on the Phase 3 sounds which are all digraphs. A digraph is a combination of two letters representing one sound. Can your child tell you any of the digraphs we have learnt so far?
People who help us
Our topic after February half term is going to be ‘People who help us’. We’ve noticed that the children are interested in police, doctor and vet role-play. As part of this topic, we’d like to organise for a visitor to come into school to talk to the children about their job. Examples of the types of people we are looking for are a police-officer, doctor, nurse, vet builder, librarian, paramedic or firefighter. If you, or someone you know, is in a profession along these lines and you would like to come and talk to the children about your job, then please speak to a member of the F2 team.
Home Link – Houses
Children have really enjoyed re-telling the story of The Three Little Pigs and it has led to several conversations about different types of houses.
- What is your house like?
- Can you draw a picture of your house or take a photograph?
Have a look at the different houses on the way to Nursery one day and talk about…
- What are they made from?
- What type of house is it?
- What number is on the door?
- What shapes are the windows/doors?
I’ll huff and I’ll puff…
Week 3 – “I’ll huff and I’ll puff…”
The story of the Three Little Pigs was really popular last week; it was great to hear so many children re-telling the story using the puppets and language from the story. In the construction area, children made houses for the pigs and there was a lot of discussion about houses being ‘demolished’. We looked at some plans for new houses on an iPad and began to draw our own architect’s plans. Mrs Brown enjoyed creating some ‘mixed-up’ fairy tales with children on Tuesday, involving big bad wolves, princesses and giants…Thankfully, they all lived happily ever after!
The cold weather provided more fun learning opportunities; we compared the size of our footprints in the snow and used different coloured paint to investigate what happens when you spray snow. There are some new icy paintings on display in the Rainbow room that we created after looking and talking about the frost. The winter-themed stories in our book corner have also sparked a new interest in penguins! Over the last week, staff have noticed children asking to listen to a story called ‘Tacky the penguin’. We talked about the iceberg that Tacky stands on. Many children hadn’t encountered them before and so we decided to try and make our own mini icebergs. We filled balloons with water and put them in the freezer. We’re looking forward to finding out what happens to them when we get them out at the beginning of next week.
We’d also like to welcome our new children and their families who have joined nursery this week. Everyone has visited nursery for their first session now and we look forward to getting to know all of the new children over the next few weeks. We’re really pleased that they’ve already started to make friends with our older children.
Week 4 – What are we learning this week?
There will be more ice investigations when we take our balloons out of the freezer and create an arctic world for Tacky’s friends in the water tray. We continue to be led by children’s interests, so many areas of nursery have a traditional story theme. We’re going to read another favourite story that has appeared on our interest board – this week we’ll be shouting, “Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum!” as we play with Jack and the Giant in his castle outside. In maths, we’ll count beans and golden coins carefully, making sure that we say one number for each object and lining them up to help us count each one once. We will also be talking about rhyming words during group times next week. Try to find some words that rhyme in your bed time stories this week!
Cultural Homework
The standard of the creative homework in Year 3/4 last week was fantastic! The presentation of artwork and handwriting is improving weekly. We saw many different examples of cultural experiences from the children ranging from films, art and sculptures, to holidays, hobbies and books.
Here are just a few examples to show the range and quality of work from our students.
Life Forces
We began our Life Forces big topic this week. Each class has talked about what they would like to find out. There were some very insightful questions including, “How to zebras get their stripes?”
We are looking forward to answering the questions and the children are particularly excited about all the Science this will involve. The BBC Bitesize website has some excellent resources that we’ll be using to support our learning.
Maths, NSPCC and Golden Stars
We’ve been continuing our addition and subtraction focus in maths. There are some examples below of how children use concrete resources and pictorial representations in their books. The Top Marks website is great for fun ways to work on maths skills at home and we particularly like Hit the Button to help with rapid recall of maths facts.
The children listened and contributed well during the visit from the NSPCC with their mascot, Buddy. They told us all about the Speak Out Stay Safe campaign. Ask your child what they learnt.
We also learnt about how there is always someone to talk to at Childline and were shown how to remember the number, 0800 1111, using our hands.
Well done to our Golden Stars from the last two weeks.
