The last week of your little ones’ first term at school ! Well done – you’ve all been brilliant. The children have settled, got to know each other, been learning how to manage their feelings, worked hard and played hard.
Our fairy story of the week was Hansel and Gretal… the children made pathways in various guises – sparkly water poured through amazing marble run constructions and stepping stone pathways back to Hansel and Gretal’s little cottage. The children have really enjoyed our fairy tales and understand that each has good and bad characters and that ultimately the good characters live …’happily ever after.’
Our number work has seen us pretend the gym mat trolley was a bus. We’ve counted the people on and off the bus – added 1 more passenger, a passenger has got off to make it one less and travelled far and wide on our bus from Wimbledon and Kingston all the way to the beach and South Africa. The children all enjoyed waiting at the various ‘stops’ and counting the children on and off the bus. We’ve also consolidated our sorting focus – looking at groups of shapes, numbers and colour – mixing them up and re- grouping all of them by colour, number or shape.
We have used numicon which are plastic pieces that represent numbers ( see the photo below) – they have the same amount of holes as the number they represent. The are colour coded too. The children learn numbers quickly using the numicon as its such a visual tool. This week we used it to add beads or seeds into each hole with tweezers mixing some fine motor work with numbers.
As usual our writing table was busy all week with Christmas card writing. We also wrote Christmas lists … Father Christmas’ sleigh needs to be big this year!
More maths combined some matching skills and fine motor skill s pairing socks! This helpful skill might come in handy when you are doing the washing! It’s really not easy for little ones but they all had a go. Our class member who persevered the most at this was Nate ! Well done Nate!
Our daily reading and writing has been complimented by some word puzzles and a fill in the missing sound activity. This is a great way to understand how the children are segmenting and remembering their sounds.
Thank you to Mio for her amazing number of the week – Number 8. A really fun and interactive Number Bag!
Of course we hadn’t forgotten it was the week before Christmas – our production lines have been in full swing making Christmas cards, tree decorations and snow globes, which all the children have all worked really hard on.
Thank you for all of your very generous contributions to the Christmas party. The children looked fabulous and had a super time playing musical statues, the hokey cokey, musical islands and so on.
Mrs Mooney, Mrs Rainey and I have had a lovely term getting to know your children and are overwhelmed with the number of gifts you have dropped off at school! Thank you so much for all your support this term and your very generous gifts. We are looking forward to opening them and no doubt eating, drinking and smelling them! Thank you all very much indeed.
Wishing you all a very Happy Christmas and a peaceful ( and exciting) New Year.