A Sticky Situation!

This week our text has been Stick Man by Julia Donaldson (author of The Gruffalo).

We went on a treasure hunt to find the perfect stick. We used our sticks to make our own stick men in the making area and in the play dough area. We used our stick men to retell the story.

 

 

We read a book by Antoinette Portis called Not a Stick.

We used our imaginations to think about what our sticks could be and the children came up with lots of great ideas. Then we used felt tips to incorporate our sticks into pictures.

In maths we have been singing counting, adding and taking away songs with props.

We made our own adding machine find out how many pom pom balls we would have altogether if we dropped some down one chute and our friend dropped some down another. We recorded our maths.

 

 We have been making temporary art inside natural picture frames and the children have been learning how to take photos themselves on the ipad, This has encouraged the children to make and take some wonderful pictures.

 

 

 We have been learning about making observational drawings and paying attention to fine details. We have been concentrating on using the correct pincer grip on our pens and add as much detail as we can.

 

 

 

A few photos form the end of last week - our handmade shakers to add rhythms to our favourite rhymes...

and photos from our retelling our own version of Peace at Last to Year 1, with sound effects!

For the next few weeks we will be focusing on Christmas - the Christmas story and how Christmas is celebrated. We will use our theme to teach all areas of learning.

We have a phonics workshop for all parents/carers on Wednesday 6th December at 9am. We would love for you to pop along so that we can share with you how we are teaching your children phonic skills.

Also to remind you that we have our Christmas Performance on Tuesday December 12th. We look forward to seeing you there. We would really appreciate it if Nursery children could bring white or yellow clothing in a named carrier bag by Friday 8th December so that we can make sure all our children are dressed for the part!

Many thanks

Peace at Last!

Peace at Last

Following our work on Owl Babies, we made our owl babies a safe and cosy owl house. We decided to add a roof to keep our owl babies dry in the rain.

Our book this week is Peace At Last ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnTVo_TDWBE)

We have had great fun making the sounds in the story and adding our own noises to the story too.

While we were thinking about sounds, we investigated materials that would make the best shakers. We decided that cotton wool was too soft and we couldn't hear it. We thought rice, lentils and pasta were the best shaker materials. We used our shakers to accompany ourselves sing rhymes and songs.

We have explored number in lots of different ways.

We threw bean bags into a hoop and counted how many landed inside the hoop and how many landed outside. We recorded what we found.

We used the play dough to sing the currant bun song. We counted how many were left each time.

We thought about the different ways of splitting our cakes but that it always made 5.

Outside the children have been using the large blocks to make some amazing constructions including this fabulous car with " a boot, a bonnet and a horn".

We have been using our fine motor skills to thread, stick and mark make. Here we made our names using stickers.

Next week we will be reading Stick Man by Julia Donaldson, and exploring using sticks for a variety of purposes including creating art work, counting and mark making.

If you would like to play games at home to help your child's learning you could try reading rhyming stories and helping your child to change the words to popular nursery rhymes :

Humpty Dumpty sat on a hat

Humpty dumpty had a great....

How could you finish this rhyme?

You could also find nonsense rhyming words for your family members and help your child make rhyming strings ...daddy, paddy, waddy  etc.

Rhyming helps your child to play with sounds and words and think about initial phonic sounds which will help them when they are ready to write.

Have fun!

Owl Babies

This week our book has been Owl Babies.

We have joined in the repeated refrain "I want my mummy!" .

The book has led to lots of learning.

We have thought about what happens in the day and what happens at night, and some of the animals that are awake at night.

We sorted the photos of day time and night time activities/ animals and used words to sequence time like 'morning', 'night time' 'day time' and 'bed time'.

 

We have made owl baby masks.  

We focussed on cutting and joining skills.  

In maths we have been playing games comparing quantities, saying which number is more,which is less and when both are the same. Cheeky monkey and Gruffalo had the same number of sweets but sometimes they were a bit naughty and took sweets from each other. The children had to see which animal had more and which had less. We told them off for being cheeky! 

We  have also been using plastic gloves filled with rice to count and add fingers

In literacy, we have been using cotton buds dipped into paint to make dotty versions of our names. We have been thinking about our phonics by playing eye spy and use robot voices to segment words (can you guess what my robot is saying - c- a- t).

The first few minutes of this video demonstrates this concept well but be careful to play with short words only.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-OKTQtFbLs

Why not have a go at home playing the robot game - asking your child "Can you put on your h- a-t?  Can you touch your b-a-ck? etc. This game really helps children to tune into speech sounds and will develop their ability to write the sounds they can hear when they are ready. If your child needs more time to learn this skill, why not start off with eye spy using letter sounds rather than the alphabet name: I spy someone who starts with mmmmmmm ....mummy!

Next week we will be going to  reading Peace at Last and thinking about the different sounds in the text and how we can make the sounds with our voices, instruments and body percussion.