Oh, what fun we’ve had reading the Gruffalo this week! Children obviously love this story; it has provided a great stimulus for conversation and is helping children to develop their early reading skills. In the large construction area, one child decided to build a ‘Gruffalo floor’ and we used this to create a puppet theatre. Children enjoyed working together to use puppets to create a show for their friends.
If you want to sing a long to a Gruffalo song that we enjoyed listening to in Nursery, here’s a link to a video you can watch at home. Julia Donaldson’s website is also full of lots of ideas and games to play too. If you have a go at making Gruffalo crumble, send us a picture and let us know what it tasted like!
The reading area has also been popular this week; we’ve added a collection of other stories written by Julia Donaldson. We’ve noticed lots of excellent early reading skills being developed.
In the Early Years Foundation Stage, when working in the 30-50 months developmental band for reading, children should begin to:
- Join in with stories and guess what might happen next.
- Listen to longer stories and talk about the main events and characters.
- Know that stories have beginnings and endings.
- Look at books independently (holding them the correct way up and turning the pages carefully).
- Talk about the illustrations and begin to understand that print is read from left to right and conveys meaning.
We also enjoyed consolidating our learning about basic 2D shapes (circle, square, rectangle and triangle) by going on a shape hunt around school. We found lots of shapes including a triangle on a sign for the swimming pool and a circle on the giant playground clock.
We played a game on the interactive whiteboard to feed the correct shape to each monster.