Living and Learning : I cover my mouth when I yawn, cough or sneeze
This is quickly becoming a habit with most children, helping us to reduce the spread of germs.
Awesome orienteering
We entered two teams in the Leeds Schools Sports Partnership orienteering competition at Wetherby High School this week. Despite the wet, cold and muddy conditions, the children performed brilliantly!
We have continued using our orienteering skills since our whole school introduction in September 2018. If you would like to get involved in this sport, contacting The Airienteers (who helped organise the event) is a great place to start.
Golden Star
Well done to our most recent Golden Star.
World Book Day and Home Link
On Thursday 5 March, we’ll be joining in with World Book Day celebrations. Children are invited to bring in their favourite story and can also bring a small soft toy to Nursery. (Please name books and toys.) Parents/carers, if you are able to, please join us for a ‘relax and read’ on Thursday morning. There’ll be lots of new ‘book themed’ enhancements in Nursery and you can enjoy sharing a story with your child before you leave at Nursery drop off time. Please read the letter in your child’s folder for more information.
Home Link Activity – Look out for a ‘Reading’ activity sheet in your child’s folder this week. Please complete it and return it to Nursery. Thank you.
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.