Sharing stories with Year 6 children for World Book Day
We had great fun dressing up as our favourite book characters on Thursday for World Book Day. Thank you for providing your child with a costume; they looked great!
It was lovely to see some parents staying for our ‘Stay and Read’ session in Nursery too. Thank you for joining us; children love it when you join in.
During the day, we enjoyed reading stories with the older children who came to visit us in Nursery. We talked about all of the characters that children were dressed as and read lots of their favourite books. It was evident that we love Julia Donaldson stories, especially The Gruffalo!
A busy first week back
Children settled into Nursery really well after the half term break. We enjoyed hearing about trips to Tropical World, Thomas Land and your family days out. Thank you for all of the photos that you sent to us.
We sang ‘Happy Birthday’ lots of times this week as part of our birthday themed learning. Children counted out the correct number of candles onto their playdough cakes, wrote birthday cards and practised their cutting skills when wrapping up presents.
We enjoyed listening to a story outside in the sunshine; we heard about a bear who just couldn’t wait until it was his birthday. He counted the sleeps each day. On his birthday morning, he woke up to find a trail of birthday balloons leading to his party. We loved this idea so much, that we made our own!
Outside, we made the most of the lovely, sunny weather. We created a ‘car’ wash and children waited patiently in line until it was their turn to go through the car wash or have their wheels cleaned. There was lots of communication and turn taking involved.
As you will have read from our previous post, we have noticed the beautiful spring flowers growing in our garden. Children showed lots of interest in gardening, especially in digging and planting. We followed this interest and bought some flowers to plant in the pots for the Nursery entrance. We looked closely at the roots before we planted the pansies and talked about what a plant needed to grow.
Phonics
Children are really enjoying their mini phonics sessions and are doing really well with learning the letters sounds so far.
At the moment, we are working really hard to hear the initial sound in words. We’ve been sorting objects by their first sounds and playing lots of games e.g. matching objects with the same initial sounds and eye-spy. If you want to play a game at home to practise these skills, you could try this game or this one. We like to play games using real objects the most – children love a traditional game of eye spy! You could easily play it on your walk to Nursery.
Over the next few weeks, some children will be introduced to ‘robot talking’. This is when we segment words into sounds and learn how to blend them together again. Segmenting and blending orally is a key skill for children to acquire before they begin the more formal teaching of phonics in Foundation 2. We practise segmenting and blending sounds that we can hear in words, we don’t expect children to recognise or write the letters at this point in Foundation 1. This skill is quite tricky and can take children some time to grasp; it will continue to be taught throughout the Foundation Stage.
To segment (robot talk) ‘bus’, we would say ‘b – u – s’ . We always use pure sounds and try to avoid putting ‘uh’ on the end of a sound. E.g. ‘ssss’ not ‘suh’. Here’s an example of oral segmenting and blending for some farm animals.
Please don’t hesitate to ask Nursery staff for any further information with how to support your child at home.
Signs of spring
It was very foggy on the way to Nursery this morning, but the children still managed to spot some signs of spring in the Nursery garden.
They talked about the flowers that they had seen at the park and at their grandparent’s houses.
“What are those white ones there? My grandma has those,” one child commented.
“Those ones are yellow. They’re daffodils,” another child spotted some small daffodils growing in the grass.
“Don’t break it or the spider will have to make another one,” someone noticed a spider web covered in tiny water droplets.
Birthday celebrations
Welcome back to Nursery
We hope that you had a fun half term break. We’re looking forward to hearing about all of your adventures and finding out about what our children’s new interests are.
Before the holidays, many children were talking about their birthdays and making cakes in the playdough area. To begin this week, we have added some birthday themed activities to our Nursery provision. We will write invitations, make birthday cards, have tea parties in the home corner and count candles on the cakes we create.
Happy Half Term!
We hope that you’ve all had a good rest over half term and have enjoyed some fun family outings. Please remember to send us one or two photographs of your activities or bring a leaflet into Nursery. We’ll be looking at them in the first week back; they are a brilliant way to encourage communication and listening.
Scholesf1@spherefederation.org
Safety week
We hope that your child has already told you all about their learning this week. They’ve been talking about keeping safe; hopefully they will have shared lots of safety tips with you and told you all about the special visitors that came to Nursery.
At the beginning of the week, children helped to carry out risk assessments for Nursery’s indoor and outdoor area. They spotted things that might cause them to trip or slip and talked about where was/wasn’t safe to play when it’s icy or wet outside.
There’s a great game on the Nationwide’s website where children can explore a virtual home and spot the dangers. (Link to follow shortly.) Children were very good at this! Well done, Nursery.
On Wednesday, we were joined by Lollypop Lady Sue. Lots of children recognised Sue and knew that she helped us to cross the road safely. We looked at Sue’s special high visibility jacket and her Lollypop sign. Some children recognised the ‘STOP’ letters and we sounded them out to read the word. Sue had lots of safety tips for us for how to travel to school safely. She reminded children to always hold their adult’s hand when they are walking on the path and crossing the road. We also talked about travelling in cars and reminding parents and carers to park safely, away from the school’s zig zag lines and driving slowly. We watched a video about road safety which gave us the message to “Stop, look, listen and think” before we cross the road.
Another highlight of the week had to be a visit from the Fire Brigade. Children were really excited and enjoyed hearing the loud siren and feeling how powerful the water hose is! To follow on from their interest in fire fighters, we have created an Emergency services role play area with the children’s ideas. They suggested lots of things that they would need and enjoyed answering 999 calls.
Phonics -Pp
Over the last few weeks, we have introduced children to some letter sounds. So far, we have learnt Ss Aa Tt and we’ll learn Pp this week.
We talk to children about the letter names and the sounds that they make. We always use the pure sound, such as ‘sssssss’ rather than ‘suh’ and ‘mmmmmm’ not ‘muh’. If you’re unsure, watch this link of our F2 teachers producing the pure sounds.
We use the Jolly Phonics songs and actions to help us learn each sound. Here’s a video of the songs for the first set of sounds that we will learn. We continue to focus on the sound of the letters at the start of words and are playing lots of games including eye spy. We use objects that begin with the letters that we have learnt so far, like in this video game. You could play your own game using objects that you find at home.
Frost, ice and snow
The cold weather didn’t stop us from venturing outside to learn last week! With our hats and gloves on, and our coats zipped right to the top, we enjoyed exploring the garden and found lots of frost, ice and sparkling spider webs.
One of the Prime areas of learning in the Early Years Foundation Stage is Physical Development and part of this relates to children’s independence skills and their ability to dress themselves. Please take advantage of wrapping up in the cold weather and encourage your child to put on their own shoes and coat. If they can do this already, can they fasten the zip on their coat or put on their own gloves? These are all great skills to learn – you might just need to get ready 5 minutes earlier to give children some extra time.
Knobbly knees, bird watching and ice
Continuing with the Gruffalo theme provided lots of opportunities to extend learning this week. There were some fantastic Gruffalo creations in the playdough area; children demonstrated great perseverance and used all the details from the story to make Gruffalo cakes with purple prickles, orange eyes and terrible teeth.
It was quite chilly outside and children spotted lots of signs of winter. We talked about the frost each morning and children were very excited to find ice in different places. After painting on the ice, children noticed that when they returned to the activity later, it had gone!
As part of the RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch, children helped to make some birdfeeders to hang in the Nursery garden. We look forward to bird watching next week.
