Useful information and requests:
- Our Fairtrade café is on Thursday 1st of March. You are invited to join your child at our cafe to buy a fair trade drink and snack and we will sing you a song. The children will be making some chocolate krispies using fair trade produce. These will be on sale at the cafe. If you are not able to attend please put a donation in an envelope and we will ensure that your child gets something from the cafe.
- Please can you ensure that your child's home/school book is in their book bag at all times in case we need to write you a message (especially on Wednesday as we always look at them then).
- Parents consultations are coming up soon. You will be asked to make your appointment online. Daytime consultation appointments will be as follows: Ducks- Monday 12th March 9am -12pm Robins- Wednesday 14th March 9am-12pm. Evening appointments are available on Thursday 15th March for Duck and Robins 3.30pm- 7pm.
- Thursday 29th March Celebration Assembly at 9.15am and repeated again at 1.30pm (The Reception children stand up to perform one thing).
- Thursday 29th March- Term ends at 2pm
- If you took jogging bottoms out of your child's PE kit please could you check that they belong to your child as we have a pair missing from Robins class. Thank you.
Things to do... - Recap this weeks phonemes- ai, ee, igh.
- Read with your child
- Discuss the importance of staying healthy- healthy food, need for sleep, exercise and healthy friendships. We also touched on stranger danger and staying clean.
- Practise subtraction with your child and sing songs that involve subtraction -ten green bottles, 5 little ducks, Encourage your child to count back from numbers up to 20.
We hope you had a lovely restful half term break. When the children came into school on Monday they found a giant egg and some footprints around the classroom. It was very exciting! As the week progressed the children thought about what might be in the egg and the footprints moved over the week. When the children came in on Thursday they found that the egg had hatched and there was a beautiful dragon. The children have used this 'awe and wonder' for a focus for their writing.
Adult Directed Learning has been focused on our Jigsaw programme. The Jigsaw topic is 'Healthy Me'- it is all about keeping healthy and looking after our bodies. The children rotated around 4 activities including:
Exercise:
The children took part in an exercise circuit – They had to climb over the play park,
going up the ladder and down the slide, zig zag between the chairs, jump through the hoops, , hop across the grid and jump and hop across the hop scotch. They repeated this circuit several times during which we asked questions about how they were feeling.
Key questions:Why is it important to exercise? What happens to our bodies after we exercise? Does anything change? How do they feel now? What changes have happened to our bodies?
Healthy Eating:
The Teacher made a shopping list – sweets, cakes, crisps, coke,
etc. Verbalising their thinking e.g. OOH! I love cake, and I love chocolate. They asked the children if
this was a good shopping list.
Sleep:
We then talked about food – how some is more healthy and we should
mainly eat those foods and that some food is less healthy and we should eat those less
often.
The children were each given a picture of food and they had to decide
whether their food was healthy or unhealthy putting it next to the correct traffic light - green or red.
Key questions included:
Are we ever allowed to eat not so healthy foods? What does
healthy food do to our bodies? If you ate less healthy food all the time what
would happen to your body? We then talked about food wastage at snack and lunch time.
We also talked about the importance of drinking lots of water!
We also talked about the importance of drinking lots of water!
Sleep:
We had items hidden from the children: dressing gown,
teddy, hot water bottle, pyjamas & a story book. We revealed each item one at a
time. We asked the children to identify what time of the day we use these items the most?
We Watched a
clip Chitty, Chitty Bang Bang- Dad singing Hushaby Mountain
The children then took turns to say what they do before they go
to sleep.
The Children then found a place to lie down and we played a
lullaby and encouraged the children to close their eyes and take deep breaths. We explained to the children that when we are asleep our bodies grow and get healthy. Sleep is as
important as eating healthy and exercise. At the end of the lullaby the children
pretended to stretch and wake up, ready to start the day.
Friends/being happy and kind:
We started by watching the following clip:
We played a musical friends game. When the
music stopped the children had to find a partner – The teacher asked them a to tell their partner their
favourite colour. This was repeated with a new partner – tell them your favourite
food/animal. The next time the teacher gave each pair
a picture about friends. The children had to talk to each other
about the picture. What is happening? What would a good friend do? The pictures include things such as a child who has fallen over and has a sore knee, a child being left out, children fighting, children having fun, a messy classroom etc. This promoted discussion about how we could be a good friend. The children then passed Jenie (our jigsaw piece) around and gave examples of what makes a good friend.
We also spoke about stranger danger and keeping clean.
We also spoke about stranger danger and keeping clean.
In maths this week we have been teaching the children to subtract.
Activity 1:
The children
were asked to count out 7 unifix. Their friend then checked they had counted 7. The teacher said now take away
4/3/5/2. How many are left? Model the language, ‘7 take away 3 leaves 4’.
This was repeated with other amounts of unifix continuing to model the language.
We then discussed how we could record this using a number sentence.
Activity 2:
Each
child was given a double decker bus sheet. The teacher
asked the children to take out 8 ‘people’ and put them on the bus. Children
roll the dice and take away that number. They repeated this several times. The adult constantly reinforced the language used – 8 take away 4 is 4.
Activity 3:
Children each have a soft tens frame filled
with red counters and a spinner
They rolled the spinner and took away that number
of pieces. The children were encouraged to say ' I have 10 counters take away 2 leaves 8
The children sang 'Five Little Ducks'.
The Teacher asked 'What is happening to the number of ducks every
time?'
Each child was given a pond/island board. The teacher said there were
9 ducks in the pond (everyone gets 9 ducks).
Children took a numbered lolly stick and took
away that number
How many
are left? The teacher modelled language used 9 take away 3 is 6.
In phonics this week we introduced the diagraphs 'ai', 'ee' and the tri-graph 'igh'. Focusing on reading for the first day and writing on the second day for each sound. See if your child can use their phoneme fingers or robot arms to sound out these words and their blending arm to blend them back together.
Your child could then have a go at writing some of these words.
ai: sail, tail, rail, mail,
ee: teeth, three, tree, bee,
igh- light, high, right, tight, sigh, sight,
The children all listened to the Chinese story of how the years are named after the animals. In ChIL this week there have been lots of activities related to Chinese New Year. The children made lanterns and fans, they did Chinese writing, cutting out pictures of Chinese animals. They used stick puppets for retelling the Chinese story. The role play area has been set up as a Chinese restaurant where the children could write menus and dress up.
The Robins enjoyed a skipping workshop this afternoon. The Ducks will be doing it next Friday.
We hope to see you at the Fair Trade Café next week.
Have a lovely weekend.
The Year R Team
