Shrove Tuesday
Thank you to everyone who e-mailed us information about your holiday activities and brought in a leaflet from somewhere you had visited. This really helped children to remember and talk about their experiences. As you’ll have read on our recent letter, whenever you take part in a Home Link activity, we’ll add a star to your child’s photograph. Don’t forget to tell us when you’ve completed one!
This week, we talked about how Christians celebrate Shrove Tuesday. We enjoyed lots of pancake day fun, including making our own pancakes and sampling different toppings at snack time. We learnt a rhyme too… Mix a pancake, stir a pancake, pop it in the pan. Fry a pancake, toss a pancake, catch it if you can!
We continued to ‘make’ pancakes in the malleable area throughout the week, although we found flipping them in the pan quite tricky! In the sensory area, children loved using the lemon juicers to squeeze out lots of lemon juice.
What is ‘GLD’?
Thank you to those of you who attended the meeting about ‘GLD’ (good level of development) on Tuesday 25 February. We hope you found the information useful in continuing to support your child on their exciting learning journey.
As we quickly continue our journey through phonics many parents have asked for more information to help understand what their child is learning in school. For example, understanding what a digraph and trigraph is. Here are some websites that may be useful.
Youtube – Mr Thornes phonics
Youtube – Jolly phonics (Phase 2 and 3)
http://www.oxfordowl.co.uk – lots of information and guidance for parents/carers
http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/ParentsMenu.htm – a selection of interactive games for all phonic phases. Mostly simple games.
www.ictgames.com/literacy.html – a great selection of games that link well with games in Letters and Sounds.
http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/ – printable resources for each of the Letters and Sounds phonic phases, also links to games aligned with each phase.
http://www.bigbrownbear.co.uk/magneticletters/ – make any words with this useful game.
Pancake Day
We talked about why and how we celebrate pancake day. We mashed some banana to put on top of our pancakes. We enjoyed eating the pancakes! After that, we wrote instructions on how to make pancakes.
Why do we have pancake day?
“He (Jesus) went for 40 days and 40 nights to the desert without any food or water,” said Ralphy.
“It’s the day of Jesus,” said Iris
“To celebrate pancake day,” said Ruby when talking about why we eat pancakes.
How do we make pancakes?
“Put some milk in, put some flour in, put some eggs in and mix it,” said Ava.
“Cook it,” said William.
What do you like on your pancakes?
“I have chocolate on my pancakes,” said Roma.
“Bananas,” said Teddy.
Science- working scientifically
This half term we are using our scientific enquiry skills to investigate different materials. We will be coming up with our own questions for investigations, and then carrying out experiments to prove or disprove these. We will be recording our findings and presenting them in different ways. The children are learning about solids, liquids and gases and applying different methods to separate them. We discussed which changes are reversible.
Class Novel – Wind in the Willows
We are looking forward to the theatre performance of Wind in the Willows by Hobgoblin Theatre Company next week (05.03.20). It will be part of our World Book Day celebrations. So we can enjoy the performance even more, we are starting to read the story. This will help us understand more about the characters and help us do more activities in our lessons around the book.
Important reminder – What is ‘GLD’?
This is a reminder about our information evening on Good Level of Development on Tuesday 25th February at 6 – 6.30pm.
As your child approaches the end of Early Years Foundation Stage, learn more about ‘GLD’ and how it’s assessed.
We hope to see you there.
Homework email addresses
Please use the email addresses below for any photos, videos or presentations that are part of homework tasks.
Y1scholeshomework@spherefederation.org
Y2scholeshomework@spherefederation.org
Living and learning : assessing risks and staying safe
We had some great homework his week about staying safe and managing risks.
Living and Learning : staying safe online
Watch this to learn how to stay safe online. Photos or videos that are oart of homework tasks can be sent to our email addresses : Y1scholeshomework@spherefederation.org or
Y2scholeshomework@spherefederation.org
Hearts
It’s hard to avoid all of the Valentine’s Day cards, chocolates and flowers in the shops at the moment and children often notice these seasonal changes in the supermarket too. This week, we added a few heart themed enhancements to Nursery. In the malleable area, we had strawberry scented dough and we added different sizes of heart cutters . Children experimented with the sizes and different ways of stacking them.
There’s always a lot of learning associated with each photograph in Early Years. Here, you can see a tray of 3 identical playdough ‘biscuits’. This took time, some thought/planning and a great deal of concentration to complete. During the process, the dough needed to be manipulated in different ways; it needed to be rolled flat with a rolling pin and then cut out using different tools. All of which requires lots of fine motor coordination and skill. In order to make these biscuits, two different sizes of heart needed selecting and stacking on top of the other, in size order. Before this photograph was taken, there were only two biscuits on the tray. At this point, we talked about how many biscuits we thought we could fit onto the tray (estimating) and how many more we would need to make. There were so many different areas of mathematics covered in one simple activity. So, the next time you see a photograph of us ‘playing’, remember to think about all of the learning that was taking place during our play.
In maths, we used the pictures on heart playing cards to help us count out the correct number of heart beads to match the number shown on the card. Our sensory area was full of red items and some children managed to find extra red things from around Nursery to add to the tray.
The ‘Fiddly Fingers’ (fine motor) area was really popular this week. Children practised using their pincer grip to pick up the tiny pegs and enjoyed creating different patterns in the peg boards.
