Friday, 20th April 2018
Early Years Newsletter
This week's news from Kindergarten and Reception
Dear Parents,
Here is an outline of our learning this week:
We settled back into our routines after the break.
Using ribbons to dance and crayons to 'write' the children completed a Write Dance song.
Our new Unit of Inquiry is about Change and we completed a pre-assessment task to find out the children's understanding of this word. They came up with some excellent suggestions and gave examples like: The trees change in Autumn, we can change our clothes and hair colour and water can evap (evaporate).
The children looked at some pictures of different items such as eggs, trees, water, tadpoles and we asked them to tell us what changes might happen to them.
We read a few life-cycle books so the children can start to build their understanding about how things grow and change.
In the garden, the children have been learning some Forest School Skills including erecting a shelter and hammering pegs into the ground. They also watched the teachers use a Bow Saw, Bill Hook and Sheath Knife to make a mallet.
The garden fairies have been hiding in the cold weather so we thought it was time to invite them back now that the sun is shining. Some children wrote letters to the fairies asking them to come back.
The deck has been popular with children using the woodwork bench and the potion station.
We started to prepare the vegetable patch ready for planting.
The biggest excitement of the week was the arrival of our duck eggs. By the end of the first day we had our first arrival and the others hatched overnight. They were named by the children: Chicky, Quack Quack, Baby Duck, Quacky and Daisy Duck Duck Goose! We will observe how they change and grow in the coming days. The children have been inspired to draw and paint pictures for the ducks.
We completed a Forest School session in Cold Fall Woods which involved learning about the boundary area and how to keep safe. The children had time to explore, play team building games and put up a shelter.
Learning in Kindergarten:
- We introduced the reading scheme The Oxford Reading Tree by meeting the characters and making up stories that match the sequence of the pictures. The children will take home one book every Monday and it needs to be returned to school by Friday. Please take time listening to your child 'read' the story to you and ask them lots of questions e.g Why do you think…..? How is he/she feeling….? What will happen next?
- We revised all of the sounds we have learnt so far s, a, t, p, i, n.
- We learned the new sound m and played games to recall words beginning with this sound.
- In Maths, the children used the counting jar to estimate and add 1 more/less
- Using the book 10 Rubber Ducks we used 10 real rubber ducks to separate into different amounts.
- We made a collection of objects for the children to sort, order, count and label reinforcing the vocabulary more and less.
Learning in Reception:
- We continued working on Phase 3 letters and sounds by revising everything we have learnt so far.
- Ar and or were the sounds of the week and we read words with these sounds and attempted to write them.
- We tried to read the tricky words: my, was, the and saw and then used the look, cover, write, check strategy to try and spell the words independently.
- To practise caption writing, we wrote the caption The farm has got a big tree, and we tried to remember capital letters, full stops and spaces between words.
- We talked about the difference between fiction and non-fiction. We looked in a non-fiction book and noticed a labelled diagram. The children then made their own labelled diagram of a duck that included a title.
- In Maths we revisited addition but we counted on rather than used objects. We chose 2 numbers and put the larger number in our head and counted on with our fingers until we found the answer. Firstly we did this in our heads but then we progressed onto using a large number line on the floor where the children could step along it.
- We counted to 20 but stared at different numbers so that we do not always start at 1.
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