This week, we have been very busy in the garden. Children helped to prepare the planters, adding in some new compost before helping to sow some vegetable seeds. Once they’d planted the seeds, children remembered that they needed to water them to help them grow.
As we were out in the garden, we found lots of insects and bugs, including some big spiders hiding in the tyres. Children loved developing their gross motor skills as they climbed carefully through our giant spider web!
We listened to a story by Eric Carle called ‘The Very Busy Spider‘ and children joined in with the repeated refrains such as, “The spider didn’t answer. She was very busy spinning her web.” We have also been learning about the different parts of a book, including the title, front and back cover and the blurb. As we read the story, we pointed to some of the words so that children start to learn that the words have meaning and are read from left to right and from top to bottom. Understanding these key concepts of print are part of our literacy curriculum.
Next time you read a book, see if your child is aware of these five key concepts:
- print has meaning
- print can have different purposes
- we read English text from left to right and from top to bottom
- the names of the different parts of a book
- page sequencing
To extend children’s interest in bugs, we have a new ‘minibeast’ themed small world area in the Sunshine Room. In the playdough area, we practised rolling ‘sausage’ shapes like we do in dough disco; we used them to make legs for our spiders. At the beginning of the week, we spotted a fly had got trapped in a spider’s web. We looked at it closely, and used the illustrations from the story to help us draw some spiders webs using chalk.
During group times, we’ve been practising our mark making skills by drawing spiders. Children drew circles for the head and body and lines for hairy legs. Some children remembered that spiders had eight legs and they counted them carefully as they drew each one. We learnt all about the number 5 and we know that when a five frame is full, there must be five objects.
Next week, we’re going to read another story written by Eric Carle. Can you guess which one? We’ll give you a clue… some caterpillars arrived in Nursery this week!