Living and Learning-I cover my mouth (when I yawn, cough or sneeze).
This week we have been thinking about manners. In particular, our living and learning weekly statement has encouraged our personal hygiene. Coughing and sneezing definitely spreads germs. We can’t all wash our hands every single time we cough or sneeze so we have a clever alternative: the vampire sneeze/sleeve. We simply cough, sneeze or yawn into our sleeves. Here some children are demonstrating the vampire sleeve.
When we yawn, we know it is polite to cover our mouths . We can do this through the covering of our mouths either by our hand or our sleeve.
Drama for Writing Workshop
On Monday and Tuesday, our children had a wonderful drama workshop by Leeds Playhouse, all about our current class novel, The Firework-Maker’s Daughter.
Paul, who led the workshop, quickly got the children into role and gathered them together as villagers from the story. Instantly, the children were transported to an emergency meeting in a village hall, somewhere in China, discussing the problem with the runaway, Lila – the Firework Maker’s daughter!
We decided on where we lived in the mountains and why we lived there…
We met some fellow villagers ….
Then, we questioned Lila and her father …
As Lila, we climbed to the top of Mount Merapi in search of the Fire Fiend….
We captured our thoughts and feelings using our 5 senses.
During the week, we’ve talked, tweaked and titillated our writing to produce quality extended pieces. We’ll post them when they’re all finished.
Well done, everybody!
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
Living and Learning-homework
Wow! There has been some fantastic creative homework this week. I can show different ways to stay safe was our prompt. Look at what we did in response…
Living and Learning-books for discussion.
We took out two books from our recent visit to Sholes village library. Both books prompted valuable discussions. The first, ‘Living with Mum and living with Dad’ allowed children to discuss their own family. We appreciated that all families are unique and the most important thing is that we are loved.
The second book, ‘Hooray for Knickers’, was very funny. It reminded us of our ‘pants are private’ rule. This rule comes from the NSPCC as an important message for preventing abuse. There is a catchy song and video that all children enjoying singing in KS1. What books will you take out of the library during this holiday?
Pirate Party
We have all had a brilliant day celebrating Pirate Pete’s birthday and the end of our pirate topic. Thank you for providing all the amazing costumes that the children were wearing today – everyone looked fantastic!
We especially enjoyed dancing at the front of Wake Up Shake Up and teaching the whole school a pirate dance we have been practising all week!
In the afternoon, we had a visit from Pirate Pete, we all sang happy birthday to him and had some pirate punch!
Have a great half term!
Year 5 game-makers
In our reading sessions this week, Y5 have practised their skills by creating there own board game.
Each day, we practised a different reading skill.
Before creating our own questions for our board game.
Today, we enjoyed playing our games (and practising our reading skills, too).
Here’s our reviews…
I really liked playing out board game especially the fact finding questions.
I enjoyed creating our board game because I’ve never done it before.
I really enjoyed playing this board game because it helps with our social skills and our teamwork as well as our reading.
I liked this week because we got to make our own questions.