It has been fantastic to see so many children have been reading at home this week, well done and keep up all of your hard work! This week the children continued to explore the topic of Winter. During PE this week the children engaged in a winter themed cosmic Kids yoga session, where they showed good attention and concentration when listening to and following instructions. This week’s Topic inputs allowed the children to use their creativity and critical thinking skills when exploring biodegradable packaging peanuts during the following activities: melting snowmen, making sticky models, making models using cocktail sticks and making goo!
The children have further explored the topic of Winter during their English exploration times this week and some of the activities have included: building winter themed objects with sugar cubes; CVC snowmen word matching; making winter themed pictures using charcoal and light blue tissue paper; exploring the texture of Gelli Baff slime with arctic animals; making a snowman using a cut and stick template; Write the room – where the children hunted for winter words around the room and then copied the words onto the correct blank label template; writing words in the snow (salt/ shaving foam); Snow Baff exploration with arctic animals; tracing winter words; and making name snowmen. During this week’s adult-led English activity the children have been writing simple words and sentences using a winter themed picture as a stimulus, which has enabled them to demonstrate and develop their ability to identify initial sounds in words and segment sounds to spell simple words.
In the outdoor learning environment the children have been playing hopscotch, sorting objects according to their initial sound, using their imagination when engaging with ‘people who help us’ playmobil figures and transport, making music following musical tune cards, exploring ways to make 5 and ordering numbers up to 10 using large numicon, writing CVC words on a chalkboard and constructing using the wooden construction blocks, tyres and crates.
This week’s Maths has focused on estimating, ordinal numbers and counting actions, objects and sounds. During our Maths inputs we have been exploring what ‘estimating’ means, doing actions to match a given number, playing finger aerobics where the children showed an amount of fingers to match a number card, counting up to and down from 10 using rocket counting, listening to sounds and saying how many, using ordinal numbers to say which position they are in a line, matching a position rosette to a number, matching ordinal number words to their position number and identifying numbers that are one more/ one less than a given number using clues e.g. I’m thinking of a number that comes before 4. This week’s Maths exploration time activities have included: counting how many objects in a bag and then recording the total amount; apple playdough Maths where the children rolled a dice and made that amount of playdough balls (apples), roll the dice again and then decide if they needed to add or subtract playdough balls (apples) to make the new amount on the dice; snowman size ordering cut and stick; number and action cards; having car races and then recording 1st, 2nd and 3rd positions using a tally chart; positional penguins where the children matched positional words to positional penguin picture cards; hiding numicon in the sand and then making a 1-10 number line; winter themed pattern cut and stick; feeding the penguin activity where the children had a penguin and had to follow an instructions card e.g. feed the penguin 2 fish; and throwing the correct amount of bean bags onto a number card. During this week’s adult-led Maths activity the children have been exploring estimating through guessing if there is more or less than 5, 10 and 20 objects.
Next week we are holding our introduction to Tapestry parent workshops (FSR parents on Tuesday 23rd January 2:30-3pm and FSF parents on Wednesday 24thJanuary 2018 2:30-3pm). Tapestry is an online learning journey on which we record your child’s learning during the Foundation Stage, during the workshop you will be given your login details and shown how to view your child’s learning journey from home. If you are unable to attend the workshop an information sheet and your login details will be sent out by the end of the week.
