Hello!
We’ve had a lovely week in Reception. This week we had great fun with another classic favourite: Peepo by Janet and Allan Ahlberg.
The children were great – joining in the refrain and spotting lots of objects some they knew, others that were quite alien to them, as the book is set in post war Britain.
We went on to adapt the story to suit us :
Here’s a group of children
1, 2 ,3
Sitting quietly on the carpet,
What do they see?
And talked about what we could see. We talked about looking into the playground and looking through own bedroom windows. The children have made some beautiful drawings which we are putting on display next week.
The Peepo story has leant itself to some lovely work from the children – some emerging writing and reading as well as many of our number objectives.
The children in the story go out fishing and sailing toy boats. Our water tray helped us reconstruct the scene and encouraged super counting of fish, adding up how many fish had been caught altogether and some taking away when lots of fish escaped back into the water!
From our Owl Babies work last week, the children had made some beautiful owls so one of this weeks tasks was to construct a tree for our owls to be in. The children all got involved in the tree creation, starting by painting the trunk!
The children had lots of opportunity to look and see in Where’s Wally books and in our Peepo story. They all loved the Where’s Wally books ( might be an idea for Christmas if you don’t have one at home already!) our clipboards were full of emergent writing of what the children had seen through the magnifying glasses in the books.
Our baby clinic role play was coming to an end this week so we had a messy baby food making station – lots of good ideas on what flavours and textures the babies might enjoy. Apologies for the state of the children’s clothes this week, we did have aprons on but they weren’t quite up to the challenge!
Looking at children’s language development was key this week, particularly when engaging in our undergrowth tray – What could they find? Using some descriptive vocabulary for colour/ texture/ size.
The children are really strong with their number work – they are practising matching quantity to numeral ( after recognising/ ordering numerals).
The writing tables had lots of interest this week. Encouragingly lots of the children were so immersed into our story that the try writing and emergent writing came thick and fast with some excellent independent sound work.
Construction is very popular, both big and small. It is a brilliant tool to observe turn taking, sharing, creativity, problem solving – the list goes on.
Our carpet sessions are always good fun, we do shared writing ( having a go writing on whiteboards) and hold up our boards when we have completed the task. These shared writing sessions take place everyday and sometimes twice a day if we can fit them in on our very busy schedule!
To match our Peepo story we played lots of Eye Spy this week. Good fun – especially when the child leading the game forgets what they were thinking of or changes their mind and sound to evade their Eye Spy being found! We decorated telescopes to help with our Eye Spy game too.
Here are the children’s lovely Owls on display on the tree that they created.
We are having a good look at reading and how we can change with our usual approach which included reading helpers from St Matthew’s Church and Year 6 reading buddies. Due to the current situation with Covid 19 we are unable to use these integral tools in our learning to read approach. We have been thinking of different ideas and the Year 6 children are going to video themselves, individually, reading a story for the Reception children. We would like to broaden this and invite parents, grandparents, relatives and other friends to record themselves, reading an age appropriate story, that we would be able to share with the children during school time. It would need you to give permission for your image to be broadcast to the class and is helpful if recorded in a neutral room/ environment. Do email if you think you would be happy to do this at any time over the school year. ( office@st-matthews.merton.sch.uk) It’s vital for children learning to read to know that reading is important and worthwhile. To see a family member actually sitting down to enjoy a good story instills reading as a way of life for the children not just a necessity. Thank you parents.
Next week is Harvest week at St Matthew’s. We will have a Farm Shop Role play, some fantastic texts to read, including Oliver’s Vegetables, and a busy time learning our words and song for our Harvest presentation which sadly this year will be shared with you virtually, rather than our usual Harvest church service.
I’ll look forward to seeing you at the gate! Have a good rest of the weekend.
Erin Bibby
The following Websites all have age appropriate learning games if you wish to try any at home:
http://www.crickweb.co.uk/Early-Years.html
http://www.literactive.com/Download/stories.asp?Flag=en-gb
https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/resources/phase/1