We have all enjoyed bringing our favourite toys in from home this as we learned how toys were different long ago.  We all talked about our toys in circle time.  The children are much more confident at speaking in front of the class now.  They then painted their favourite toys. 

We looked at toys that the teachers played with when they were little (so very old ones!) and discussed how they worked.  The music box played by winding it up and had no batteries which the children found very strange!  The Etch-a-Sketch was very popular and great practise for little fingers to turn the knobs and draw.  It was interesting that to erase the picture, we had to shake it!

We talked about the toys of today, how they are different and what they are made of, including computers.  We also looked at toys from long long ago, when the Queen was a little girl and how they weren’t made of plastic, were very simple and definitely had no batteries or plugs and were very simple.

In English we practised hearing and saying initial sounds.  The children used their phonic sounds learned so far (s a t p i n) to draw pictures of things beginning with those sounds.  They also attempted to form those letters.

In Monster Phonics this week we learned the sounds m d g.  The children are practising recognising these sounds along with s a t p i n and are also practising blending them to made 2 and 3 letter words, such as at, it, cat, pan, tap, pit, sit, mat, dig, etc.  We also practise segmenting these words; breaking them down into their single phonemes like robots. 

We read ‘The Button Box’ in maths this week and explored sorting different buttons by their shapes, colour and number of holes.  The children could sort by a given criteria, such as colour and also decided upon their own way of sorting them.  We also played ‘guess my rule’ whereby I sorted the buttons in a certain way (eg, red buttons and buttons with 2 holes) and the children had to guess how I’d sorted them. 

In PE this week, we practising our balancing skills by thinking about all the different parts of our body and which we could use to balance.  We used a variety of equipment to travel and balance on and through too.

We also entered the forest for our first Forest Learning session today despite the rain!!  We learned the rules and how to be safe in there – where we could explore and how to behave.  We sang songs and enjoyed a hot chocolate at the end of the session too 😊 (see Forest Learning section for photos).
 

We finished off the week with some Cosmic kids Yoga 🧘‍♀️ 

Next week we will start to send the children home with a reading book.  They will be wordless to start with, so the children can enjoy talking about the story to you and enjoy the pictures.  Please make a note in their reading diaries too so we know they have read at read at home.  We will also send home the first sets of high frequency words for them to learn.  We learn these in class too, but it is important they practise as often as they read their books at home.  Many thanks for your support with this.

Have a lovely weekend!