Week ending 27th May 2022

Celebrating the Queens Platinum jubilee

The children enjoyed preparations for our whole school party and parade for this special occasion.  We made party hats, added jubilee plates and cups to our cafe, completed Jubilee colouring sheets and listened to and marched around to Queen's Jubilee music.

The children enjoyed dancing and playing with their siblings and older friends in the playground.

I hope you all have a fantastic half term.

Week ending 20 May 2022

This week we washed dolls clothes.  We looked in our kitchen and discussed the washing machine and tumble drier.  We looked closely at a range of dolls clothes and the materials they were made out of.  We hand washed our dolls clothes in the water play tray using blocks of soap, next we rinsed the clothes and used pegs to hang them out on the washing line to dry.

Through 'household' peg play children can learn colours and counting, improve fine motor skills and enjoy experimental play. 

Our science activity this week was to experiment with a range of objects to find out whether they would sink or float.

Cafe Role Play - the children have loved our new 'Cosy Cafe' and have been learning a range literacy and mathematical skills.  They  enjoyed setting the table (practising one to one correspondence).  They  used emergent writing skills to take orders.  They particularly enjoyed dressing up as chefs, waiters and waitresses, cooking and serving food.

Week ending 13th May 2022

This week the children explored a range of materials to create individual collage pictures. They used feathers, plastic chips, coloured sand, textured fabric and paper and rainbow rice.  They were encouraged to use descriptive language to describe different materials.

Making a collage helps your child to build fine motor skills. It is also a fun way to build your child's awareness of colour and texture and develop their language skills.

In literacy we continued to work on our focus story book 'Stanley's Stick' -  the children drew pictures in their learning story books of their favourite part of the story.  They used emergent writing to write about their pictures. 

They used a range of materials to sort and count and they experimented with rainbow rice - filling containers, tipping and pouring to learn about capacity.

Week ending 6th May 2021

This week all the children made a model using hammers, nails and balsa wood. Every child spent a long time making their individual model and they were all were very proud of their completed masterpieces. 

Health and safety was a key feature to this activity and the children engaged in a range of mathematical concepts as they worked out which shape of balsa wood they needed and what size nail to use.

Benefits of woodwork - children learn to:

• problem solve, experiment,concentrate and think critically
• take controlled risk, self-assess and make judgements
• gain self esteem and confidence when trusted to use tools
• develop an interest in building, joining and constructing
• develop finer physical skills as they work with small tools
• be creative
• develop communication and language skills
• learn about the environment and materials in terms of where wood comes from
• Have fun as they work together and use their imaginations

Week ending 29th April 2022

We have made a good start on our new topic 'materials'

We used recycled bottles to make 'shaker' instruments.

First the children decorated their bottle with a range of collage materials.  They experimented with a funnel to fill their bottle with salt, pasta, rice, lentils and dried beans.  They went on to make quiet, loud, fast and slow sounds and played their instrument as they sang along to the nursery rhyme 'jelly on the Plate'.

We shared the picture book Floppy's Phonics At the Carnival and explored a range of instrumental and environmental sounds as shown in the book.

Our Story Book focus for this half term is 'Stanley's Stick'.  The children enjoyed listening to the story, playing with our 'Stanley' puppet and all of the story book resources.  We heard some fantastic story telling - the children are developing narrating skills very well.  They also enjoyed making up their own stories.

Stanleys stick is a book about imagination and how simple objects like a stick can become so much more.   The book has interesting use of rhyming and alliteration for children to pick up on.

During singing time all the children were given two sticks each to tap.   We sang and played our rhythm sticks along to the song Rhythm Stick Rock (this song can be found on You Tube).