Fun with Phonics!
This week, the children have learnt to read three tricky words – the, I, and and – as well as segmenting and blending CVC words e.g. s/u/n and reading short captions – ‘the sun’ or ‘Biff and Chip’.
The children have enjoyed playing various games to help with their sight reading of the tricky words. They have particularly enjoyed playing ‘Boo’ and singing the Jolly Phonics songs.
Fiddly Fingers Stay and Play
We’d like to invite you to the first of our Foundation Stay and Play session which will be on Wednesday 15 November. The focus of this session will be ‘Fiddly Fingers’.
Your child will be designing a personal invite for you and a letter detailing the information will be sent home soon.
We look forward to your visit.
Holiday adventures
Thank you to everyone who has e-mailed photographs and details of your activities in the holidays or to those that have sent in leaflets.
One of the most popular activities was pumpkin picking at Farmer Copley’s pumpkin festival, Piglet’s Adventure Park or Canon Hall Farm. It looks like you all had a good time scooping out the slimy insides and carving some very elaborate designs into them. (What a talented group of parents and carers you are!)
You told us all about…
- Discovering dinosaurs at Temple Newsam. Mrs Long thought that she could hear some strange noises when she was hanging washing out in her garden!
- Trips to museums and finding out about space.
- Learning to swing without being pushed.
- Eating pizzas at Pizza Express – mmmmm!
- Shark spotting at The Deep.
- Mark making, drawing pictures and writing letters.
- One lucky person even got to go camping…in the Moroccan desert and met a magician! Lawson told us all about his trip to see the magic man and toasting marshmallows on the fire.
We have enjoyed sharing the photographs with the children and it has been a lovely opportunity for children to tell us all about their adventures. It really helped them to remember what they had done during the holidays; children often forget to tell us about home, just like they forget to tell you about their day in nursery!
Children were excited to see their photographs on our iPads and they were eager to share their experiences with their friends. It provided lots of conversation, even with some of our quieter members of nursery.
Thank you for taking the time to e-mail us and please continue to keep us up to date with your child’s learning and new fascinations and interests.
It’s not too late to send us your holiday photographs if you haven’t already. We’ll look forward to seeing some more.
Swimming starting soon!
Swimming at school will start next week (w/b 06 November). The children will swim once a week on either Monday or Wednesday afternoons. Your child should have a letter in their book-bag with their swimming day.
A qualified swimming instructor will be teaching the children and will be following the ASA swimming award scheme.
Please can children bring a named one-piece costume / trunks and a towel in a named bag on their swimming day. Please ensure your child is wearing uniform they can change in and out of independently (tights are tricky on wet legs!). Please pack a spare pair of underwear and socks as these easily get wet by the poolside.
Adjective Dress Up Day – 01 November
We’re looking forward to it and we hope you are, too! More details can be found in the letter we sent home last week.
Home Link – Tell us about your holiday adventures
What did you do in the holidays?
Can you bring a souvenir or leaflet from somewhere you went in the holidays?
It may be a trip to the park, a farm or maybe the seaside. We’re going to share our adventures during the first week back and encourage children to tell their friends during group time.
You might want to draw a picture or send a photograph to our nursery email – scholesf1@spherefederation.org
Happy half term!
What a super half term we’ve had at nursery!
We can’t believe it’s the end of our first half term together. We’re amazed by how well the children have settled and really begun to forge some lovely friendships with old and new faces. A big thank you to everyone who has contributed to the ‘interests’ board. ‘Paw Patrol’ has been mentioned several times by the children and parents alike. So much so, that we decided to turn our large construction area into a Paw Patrol look out tower! This has provided fantastic opportunities for the children to develop their communication, imagination and number skills-all whilst ‘just playing’ of course! Outdoors, several children really enjoyed creating ramps and slopes for different vehicles to use. We made predictions about which cars would travel the furthest, tested our guesses and then made marks using chalks to compare the results. Lots of super language: “The green truck will go the furthest, look it’s going down the very steep ramp.”
We enjoyed learning about Diwali, too; we listened to the story of Rama and Sita and found out about the Festival of Lights is celebrated. Some of our children told us all about the fireworks they were going to see on Thursday evening.
It’s nearly good bye… Miss Logan has worked closely with Mr Gledhill over the last few weeks to ensure a smooth transition for the children in green group. Miss Logan will be returning to school to work her remaining four weeks in Year 1 (so she can sit down a little bit more!) However, we’re lucky to have her back for her final day in nursery on Tuesday 31 October to say a final goodbye!
What are we learning after the holidays?
We’ll have a Halloween theme throughout nursery upon our return with a focus on pumpkins as we enjoy the story ‘Pumpkin soup’ in key worker time. We shall be getting messy in the sensory area, squishing and squashing the flesh and looking closely at the insides. Best of all, we’ll be making a delicious and healthy pumpkin soup! There will be lots of opportunities to develop our creative sides as we make glittery playdough spiders and explore capacity in the ‘magic water’ with different sized bottles and containers. Outdoors, the mud kitchen will be a real hive of activity as we explore what happens when we use vinegar and bicarbonate of soda in our spells! We hope someone remembers to write the magic potions down on the notepads so we can talk about them afterwards (and develop our mark making skills!)
Have a super half term holiday!
Conkers and School Council
We’ve had another learning-loaded week to finish the first half term of the school year. Our English work has involved lots of noun-spotting and securing sentence construction. You could help consolidate this learning at home by looking out for, and talking about, nouns and how they appear in our language.
We also collected a whopping 1,343 conkers. We’ve used them to help us count in 10s. You could join in at home and collect interesting objects to count in 2s, 5s or 10s. Now we’ve finished with them, we’ve returned them to the woods behind school for the squirrels to enjoy – and hopefully a few will grow into chestnut trees, too!
The excitement was palpable during the voting for the school council representatives. We used a voting booth, ballot papers and a ballot box to make it an authentic experience. Well done to those that got voted in.
The class assembly from 2KL was amazing. The children were so excited and proud to share all their learning. Thank you to all the parents and carers who came to support the children.
Diwali
Today, we have learnt about Diwali. We read the story of Rama and Sita and talked about ‘the festival of light’. The children have enjoyed colouring and painting Rangoli and Mehndi patterns.
We talked about how Diwali is celebrated and how it is similar to how we celebrate our birthday and Christmas.
Fun with phonics!
This week, we’re focusing on the sounds that we have learnt so far: s, a, t, p, i and n. We’ll be singing the Jolly Phonic songs and listening for words that begin with these sounds. We’ll also be looking at how to form the letters.
Ask your child what sounds the objects in the picture below begin with. Let us know what your child said using a WOW sheet.
