A few missed photos from before the holidays

Making skeleton pictures from Funny Bones.

Cutting out skeleton pieces to join together with split pins.

Sharing books over a sustained period of time. 

"Free flow"/ child led activities.

Look what Ryan made at home. We love celebrating home learning.

Matching colours to shapes and being able to name the shape.

The children are also assessed on recognising shapes in the environment. Most of us know square, rectangle, circle, triangle and some of us know pentagon and hexagon. Most of us can describe flat shapes by how many edges/ sides they have as well as corners. We are moving onto 3d/ solid shapes so if yo have any interesting small boxes please do send them in. 

Thank o for all the gorgeous family photos. They now form part of our special people display. 

Whoops just noticed the s has fallen down in the title. 

Welcome back

The children have had a happy confident start back after an amazing half term. I love finding out where they have been and what they have been doing. Reading their wow speech bubbles has been super. Thank you to everyone who have returned them. If they aren't filled in please take time in the next couple of weeks to complete a few as they go towards your child's learning profile. It was great seeing the diversity of activities from Harrison learning how to do rising trot on his pony, to Bertie "driving" some sort of digger/ crane, Ryan went to the Rowdey cow for the first time as well as demonstrating some super number skills and Ted,  was it only a week off school you had. You were so busy. It was lovely reading about friendships out of school and how Benjamin tidied his room after play dates as well as taking care of his baby sister. Harvey had a super visit to the tank museum and in fact tried to write about this today using some initial sounds. The list of activities is endless. 

I am impressed with many of the children's learning- the difference in confidence and resilience in those that have been regularly supported is enormous. I am now seeing children making connections between individual sounds they are learning and being able to build simple three letter words (cvc) such a cat, dog and pig. Some children are even trying to use the occasional tricky words in their writing and most could use I.  This is why I love working with Foundation 2 (reception) children, their minds absorb so much and making mistakes is just part of the process. This really is why learning is a partnership between home and school. 

We started the day with a ventriloquist and the children loved it. They were roaring with laughter and some even offered to volunteer to help.

Bertie was very confident in front of all three classes.

Oscar met the penguin and was in fits of giggles.

Lacey met"doggy" and had to keep retrieving the frisbee he kept dropping. Even she was starting to get a little fed up by the 6th retrieval.

In writing we did some holiday news. I shared a sentence on the board using quite simple language asking the children to help me sound words out. "I wet tu th pk" . Yes there are lots of mistakes that are obvious to us a it should red "I went to the park", but the children told me what sounds to use and I talked about the purpose of finger spaces ( a more advanced skill) and the full stop- to stop words from running away. This was their first go at really writing anything apart from their name and the objective was to encourage them to verbalise a simple sentence, have a go at recording it, using sounds that they know and with access to a sound card. Lots of different skills but we will now start to build on them week by week. 

We worked in groups ordering numbers 1-10. We will move onto bigger numbers later in the week.

Lots of co- operative learning and social skills.

We have the Zoo lab in on Thursday afternoon, looking at water animals I believe. Please can you all check that you have sent in the letter and contribution. 

Don't forget to book parents evening.

This term our topic is the Jolly Postman and Jolly Christmas postman. The children love these books and we will be creating a post office in the build up to Christmas. If anyone knows a postal worker who might be able to talk to the children please let me know. We enjoy learning from outside visitors. 

See you tomorrow, 

Mrs Bq

Guess what we are doing.

Lots of happy confident children.

The children all have a good level of physical development.