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.
Home Link – Holiday adventures
Don’t forget the Home Link activity for this week was to let us know all about your holidays! We look forward to hearing all about your adventures. Please scroll to our previous post if you need any more details.
Welcome back!
Week 1 – What are we learning this week?
Welcome back to nursery. We hope that you all had a relaxing and fun week off and are ready to learn. We’re sure that the next 6 weeks will bring us lots of eggcitement…
We’ll begin our week in nursery continuing with our dinosaur themed learning. Children were really interested in all things to do with dinosaurs before we broke up and when we asked them about their interests and what they’d like to learn about, they were keen to keep our dinosaur enhancements. In the last week of term, Freya brought in some ‘fossils’ of dinosaur footprints that she had made as part of her home link activity; they created lots of discussion about fossils and how they were made and so she is going to help her nursery friends make their own this week. We’ll be looking at the different sizes and shapes of dinosaur footprints. Have you ever wondered how big a T-Rex’s footprint was? We might try and find the answer to this, and any other dinosaur questions that children have, using non-fiction books and the internet.
We’ll be looking for any new interests and fascinations that occur during children’s play this week. Please let us know if your child has suddenly become interested in anything new – jot it down on a post-it note on our interest board.
Before the holidays, we had a few children who were obviously enjoying the cold weather and ‘Frozen’ themed role play. We’ve responded to this with a new small world area in the Sunshine room; we’re sure this will be very popular! You may also have noticed that we’ve had a move around! We’ve expanded our construction area and it now includes a selection of interesting props. Children have already begun to incorporate them into their role play.
Chil
dren began to make their own Valentine’s Day cards in the week before the holidays so we enhanced the writing table with lots of Valentine’s themed craft resources. It was a very busy table and it was great to see so many children writing/mark making!
Reading Workshop
Thank you to all the parents who attended the reading workshop during parents’ evening last night. Don’t worry if you missed it because the workshop will be running again during the parents’ evening on Wednesday 07 February between 5pm and 7pm.
The workshop provides tips and advice on how to support your child’s reading at home. The year 6 children running the workshop demonstrate games and activities to encourage a love of reading. If you have five minutes after visiting your child’s class teacher, then pop in and see what the children have to offer.
Below are some comments from parents who attended the workshop:
- “This was a useful and informative workshop. Useful for our two younger children.”
- “Good descriptive information to support at home.”
- “Really fun and enjoyable. I’d recommend coming.”
Home Link – Half term adventures
Please remember to complete the Dinosaur Home Link if you haven’t already. Children love to see their pictures on display and enjoy sharing their favourite story books from home with their friends.
There are lots of dinosaur related games and activities on-line. You could listen to a story all about a dinosaur on CBeebies bedtime stories.
Holiday fun
We always like to find out what the children have been doing in half term, but their usual response is, “I can’t remember!”
Please can you help them! Send us some photographs, save a leaflet from somewhere you visit or draw a picture together of something that you do. It usually opens up a great conversation and other children will often then join in. Thank you – we look forward to hearing all about your holiday activities.
Here come the dinosaurs… STOMP, STOMP, STOMP!
Week 5 – Dinosaurs
It was great to see the excitement and interest in our new dinosaur enhancements last week. Children were particularly drawn to the maths area where they lined up the mini dinosaurs to count them and to sort them according to various categories including size, type and colour. We began to find out lots of facts about dinosaurs; we talked about their body shapes and what type of food they ate. Children enjoyed learning some new big words, including herbivore and carnivore. We wonder if they can remember what they mean? Many children became interested in volcanoes and lava throughout the week. We watched some videos of volcanoes erupting and the children were set a challenge… Could they make their own erupting volcanoes using the Duplo bricks? There was a lot of team work as the children created a volcano shape using the bricks and with a bit of vinegar and bicarbonate of soda magic, they enjoyed watching the fizzing and bubbling as their volcano erupted!
Mark making was a popular activity outside last week. Children used the giant chalks to draw lines, circles and crosses on the playground. (Great for developing their gross motor skills!)
Week 6 – What are we learning this week?
Wow! The final week of half term already. As the children are still keen to find out more about dinosaurs, we’ll continue to see where this interest leads us this week. In group time, we’re learning to hear the initial sounds in words and we’ll be learning a new letter. It’s the first sound in one of our favourite dinosaurs… stegosaurus. We’ll play eye spy with objects beginning with ‘s’ and will sort objects into those beginning with ‘d’ and ‘s’ sounds.
You can listen to the ‘s’ Jolly Phonics song that we will be listening to here. Children don’t need to be able to write the letter ‘s’ just yet, we will focus on the ‘s’ sound that it makes and will identify words that begin with this sound. What can you find at home that begins with ‘s’? If you notice your child becoming more aware of sounds, remember to e-mail us their Wow moments.
The Big Ink Cartridge Collection
WANTED!
School council are collecting used ink cartridges to raise money for our school and our chosen charity – The Donkey Sanctuary.
All collected used ink and toner cartridges are recycled in an environmentally friendly way and the money raised is donated back to us! The more cartridges we can collect, the more we can raise.
If anyone’s workplace throws their ink cartridges away, we’ll be happy to recycle them for you!
An ink cartridge recycle box is waiting for your donation in the main office reception.
Home Link – Dinosaurs 29.01.18
We’re going to be learning about dinosaurs this week, so we thought you would like to surprise us with your dinosaur-themed activities.
You could…
- Read a dinosaur story and tell us about it, or even better, bring it in for us to share together.
- Find out some Dino facts in a non-fiction book.
- Send us a photograph if you have lots of dinosaurs at home. Can you line them up and count them?
- Draw/paint a picture or make a model of a dinosaur.
- Make a dinosaur shape picture.
- Find other objects that begin with the letter ‘d.’
- Bake some dinosaur shaped biscuits.
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.
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?