Golden Star
Well done to our Golden Star this week. You show resilience in your learning and always have a smile on your face!
A Visit to Scholes Library
A group of children from each class visited Scholes Library and chose a selection of books for their classmates. The books have already proven popular!
How many?
As part of our topic, we combined science and maths to find out how many times we could perform certain tasks in one minute. We noticed the effect this had on our bodies – increasing heartbeat and breathing faster.
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.
Wonderful Writing!
This week in writing, the children have been using conjunctions, even though and although, both at the beginning and in the middle of sentences. For our extended writing task, we rewrote one of the chapters from Akimbo and the Elephants (our class novel), trying to include these conjunctions and use ambitious vocabulary. Here are examples by William and Ruqayyah – well done!
Be reading ready!
We hope your child is enjoying the opportunity to use their reading journals, which were sent home a couple of weeks ago. Although we set a target page for their group reading book, children should feel free to read further. Children should be using their journals to capture their thoughts about what they have read.
Here are some ideas of how to use your journal:
- word banks
- summaries
- questions about the character/ text/ plot
- predictions
- labelled diagrams from descriptions
- reviews
- author fact files
- lists of books read
- lists of new vocabulary
- glossaries
- lists of impressive words
Pure sounds!
A number of parents have been asking how to pronounce the ‘pure’ sounds when reading with their children. We also teach the children the letter name. However, the ‘pure’ sound helps children to segment and blend words when reading.
Here are the pure sounds pronounced by Mrs Flynn and the actions shown by Miss Eckersley! Can you get your child to show you at home?
We are now working on the Phase 3 sounds which are all digraphs. A digraph is a combination of two letters representing one sound. Can your child tell you any of the digraphs we have learnt so far?
People who help us
Our topic after February half term is going to be ‘People who help us’. We’ve noticed that the children are interested in police, doctor and vet role-play. As part of this topic, we’d like to organise for a visitor to come into school to talk to the children about their job. Examples of the types of people we are looking for are a police-officer, doctor, nurse, vet builder, librarian, paramedic or firefighter. If you, or someone you know, is in a profession along these lines and you would like to come and talk to the children about your job, then please speak to a member of the F2 team.
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?