Hello! Staying with our baby theme we centred our learning around The Owl Babies by Martin Waddell – a familiar tale for all. We enjoyed the story , all children managed to sequence the story through pictures and match quotations from the story to the correct picture – the very beginning of learning how to do comprehension.
The children enjoyed our Owl Babies themed activities, working together to build nests for the baby owls…
Everybody painted their very own baby owl…
As well as deciding that Owls like to make their nests in big trees , like horse chestnuts … leading us onto finding conkers and using them for some number work – counting and finding out how many conkers would fit into various sized containers.
We had a series of owl pictures ready to cut and stick. The children practised their fine motor cutting skills and placed and arranged some impressive owl designs.
On the writing table the children thought of and wrote owl names … some really fun ones – they ranged from Flappy Flap and Fluffy to more serious owls such as Walter and Reginald! I wonder what stories that family have been reading?!!
As usual a range of construction toys were available for all sorts of wonderful creations. Working together the children manage to feed ideas to and from each other and make some super designs.
Lots of turn taking games enable the children to work together, be patient and build relationships with each other.
We have worked hard with numbers this week: recognising, ordering, counting, matching quantity to numerals, grouping, sorting, counting from a larger group, checking one to one correspondence skills, joining 2 sets of objects and finding the total along with knowing one more/ one less than a given number. We also looked at 2D shape and the children made their own AB pattern.
There were plenty more activities to complete this week including a very tricky pattern puzzle, following patterns with the compare bears, floating, sinking and balancing with conkers in the water tray and of course more role play in our baby clinic.
More fun was had this week in PE – we cut our changing time by 10 minutes compared with last week – brilliant! We encourage the children to change independently, although of course help with buttons, zips, tights and so on. The children are all doing very well with their self help skills. At home, please encourage your child to get dressed/ undressed independently – start with getting into pyjamas and nighties. The children are all very determined and we praise any self help / dressing/ looking after their belongings highly – even when the children get dressed with all clothes inside out and back to front! This week we had 1 grey school sock left over. All children were wearing 2 socks at the end of the day, so we were unable to re- unite it with its owner – if you are missing a sock just let me know! Once in PE we are learning about space, speed, direction and various ways to move. All the children are enjoying the lessons and we have some super sportsmen and women in the class.
During playtime all the girls joined in a hoop game – the children are having so much fun at school, and learning lots too! Thank you for all your support. It’s not easy to build relationships with each family, as we usually try to do, in these strange times but I hope your children are coming home exhausted, hungry and happy! They are all doing great things at school and you should all be very proud. Have a super weekend.
