The children returned to Nursery happily on Monday with lots of chatter about their half term adventures. Some children had been on trains and some on long car rides to various destinations. This talk led us to think about lots of different types of transport – cars, trains, planes and boats.
We sorted and counted lots of different types of vehicles in the Maths area, counting some really high numbers as we lined up the vehicles.
During story time, we’ve enjoyed listening to The Train Ride. We noticed that the rhythm of the story makes us think about the train going along the track. We drew some maps of the journey, passing the sheep in the meadow and the lighthouse at the seaside.
Outside in the Nursery garden, we got a wonderful surprise to see that our strawberries, beans, peas and carrots were growing so well. We can’t wait to start harvesting them once they’re ready. How are your beanstalks growing at home? Don’t forget to let us know.
In group time, we talked about night and day and next week, we’ll move on to ordering key events in our daily routines .
Some more learning from this week.
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?
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. 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, for example ‘ssss’ not ‘suh’.
So for example, you may ask your child if they would like some ‘j – a – m ‘ on their toast at breakfast.
Please don’t hesitate to ask Nursery staff for any further information with how to support your child
Next week’s story of the week
Duck in the Truck
And finally…
The children watched a video this week of our butterflies being set free. They decided to arrive a little later than expected, during the half term holidays. We are sure that they will find their way to our Nursery garden, so we’re keeping a look out for them everyday.
