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?
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!
Home Link – The Three Little Pigs
This week, we’re going to be reading the story of The Three Little Pigs so we’d like you to enjoy reading this story at home together.
You could also…
- Draw, paint a picture or collage of the Three Little Pigs
- Make a house that you think the Big Bad Wolf wouldn’t be able to blow down! What would you use?
- Re-tell the story using different voices for the pigs and the wolf
- Think of some words that rhyme with pig
- Look for the number 3 and groups of 3 things when you are out and about (eg 3 on a bus, 3 lights on a traffic light, 3 red cars etc…)
- Listen to the story on-line
- Visit a farm and find out about pigs!
Run, run as fast as you can!
The Gingerbread Man story has provided us with lots of fantastic learning opportunities. The story props in our small world area have been very popular; children have enjoyed using them to re-tell the story and it has been great to hear children using lots of storytelling language and some of the repeated refrains from the story. At the beginning of the week, children had lots of fun trying to find The Gingerbread Man that kept hiding around nursery! We talked about the Gingerbread Man running everywhere and some children remembered that he shouldn’t run in nursery and decided to draw some posters telling him to slow down and walk.
We also continued to practise our counting skills – counting out and drawing the correct number of buttons on our gingerbread men. Children are becoming much better at accurately counting objects and at counting out 3-4 objects from a group. Remember to keep practising these important skills at home.
As you are no doubt aware from the muddy trousers and tights that you have to wash, we’ve still been playing outside in the cold and damp weather! This week, we’ve taken advantage of the mixed weather conditions. On Monday, we looked at the patterns in the frost and were inspired to create some icy artwork and on Wednesday, we listened to the pitter patter of raindrops under a tent that we made. Children loved colour mixing with paints in the puddles and creating footprints with their wellies.
Week 3 – What are we learning this week?
Thank you to those of you that have added your child’s favourite fairy tale story to our interest board. If you haven’t had chance yet, please do so next time you’re in nursery. Last week, whilst we were in the middle of making a den, children began to include a favourite character into their role play – can you guess who?
“I’ll huff and I’ll puff…” This week, in response to their play and favourite stories, we’ve added some ‘Three Little Pig’ themed enhancements to nursery provision. In the maths area, we’ll be investigating and looking at the number 3 (3 pigs, 3 wheels on a tricycle, 3 buttons on a gingerbread man, 3 sides on a triangle…). What can you find linked to the number 3 at home?
We’re also really looking forward to welcoming our new starters for their first sessions in nursery. As you will remember, the first few sessions at nursery for some children can be quite daunting; please be patient and bear with us if staff are helping to settle the new children.
Reminders
- Have you applied for your school place yet? The Deadline is Monday 15 January.
- Have you got any ‘Wow’ moments to e-mail us? What has your child done recently that has impressed you? We’d love to know too, so please let us know.