Children returned to Nursery happily on Monday and enjoyed telling us about their holiday adventures. These conversations led to us to talk about different types of transport, including trains, boats and planes.
We sorted and counted lots of vehicles in the maths area and built a train with carriages in the construction area. Children made tickets to sell to the passengers as they got on board.
During story times, we’ve enjoyed hearing about the adventures of ‘The Little Red Train‘ and watching a song about a magic train ride. We looked closely at the detailed illustrations in the Little Red Train books and talked about the different places that Duffy, the driver, visited. Was it the city, countryside or seaside? How did they know?
Children drew a map of the journey; the train started in the city and travelled past farms in the countryside and went through a dark tunnel before it reached the seaside.
Children loved using the remote controlled cars this week and were able to move them backwards and forwards between the obstacles.
In group time, we talked about night and day and next week, we’ll move on to ordering key events in our daily routines .
Help at home: Talk to your child about day and night time. What activities do people do in the day and at night? What do they do in the morning/afternoon/evening?
After lots of interest in pouring the PVA glue between containers in the craft area, we decided to add to slime to our sensory area. It was a big, albeit messy, hit!
We’ve also enjoyed fire fighter role play (Do you like our safety helmets?), making planes and spaceships and practising our cutting skills.
Next week’s learning:
For the final half term, we’ll revisit all of the sounds we have learnt and we will focus on key phonics skills such as identifying initial sounds, spotting rhymes and segmenting and blending words.
Over the next few weeks, our focus will be on oral ‘segmenting and blending’ skills. This is when we segment words into sounds and learn how to blend them together. Segmenting and blending orally is an important skill for children to acquire before they begin the more formal teaching of phonics in Reception. We practise segmenting and blending sounds that we can hear in words, we don’t expect children to recognise or write the letters in Nursery. 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 ‘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’.
Please don’t hesitate to ask Nursery staff for any further information with how to support your child at home.