This week, children enjoyed reading our new story, Tidy by Emily Gravett.
Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog (it’s along the play bar) and turn off auto play – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip.
We’ve enjoyed discovering the woodland world of Pete the Badger and have started to explore some of the themes and important messages in the story in preparation for our trip to Nell Bank next week. As we listened to the story, we paused to discuss the meaning of unfamiliar words. Some of the vocabulary we explored included tidy, environment, habitat and mistake. We also started to retell the story using a story map to help us remember the key events.
Many of the activities at Nell Bank will be linked to this story so look out for next week’s post to find out more!
Phonics
In phonics, we’ve been learning to read and spell words ending in -s and -es. Children explored how the letter s at the end of a word can make different sounds (/s/ and /z/) and we practised reading plural words such as trains, sports and dresses. The children also worked on reading and spelling longer words using the phonics sounds they already know, helping to build their confidence and fluency in reading and writing.
Help at home: Support your child to consolidate their learning of tricky words by playing Tricky Word Treasure Hunt.
- Write a few tricky words on separate pieces of paper.
- Hide them around the room.
- Ask your child to find a word, read it aloud and then use it in a sentence.
You could make the game more challenging by asking your child to find a specific word or by timing how quickly they can read all of the words. This is a fun way to practise recognising tricky words and build reading confidence.
Maths
This week in maths, we’ve been revisiting and consolidating our understanding of numbers to 10 by:
- Exploring how numbers can be split into smaller parts and recombined to make a whole.
- Comparing quantities and using the language of more than, fewer than and equal to.
- Investigating one more and one less within 10.
- Using practical resources such as rekenreks, counters and our fingers to deepen our understanding of number.
- Playing games and solving problems to develop confidence with numbers to 10.
PE
Children were very excited to find out we were going to play our ‘Mouse Trap’ game again! We revisited the game to continue developing our aiming, control and coordination skills and added a new twist. This time, we adapted the game by using rackets and hockey sticks to control and stop the balls. We experimented with different-sized balls to provide a range of challenges and to encourage the children to move in different ways to intercept, stop and direct the ball.
Poetry Basket
This week was a rhyme week in our Poetry Basket sessions. The children enjoyed joining in and singing ‘The Big Ship Sails on the Ally Oh‘ and had lots of fun learning the actions and joining in with the repeated phrases.