What Early Years got up to this week

PRE-RECEPTION

Firstly, the children have had a busy week planting and caring for their sunflowers and tomato plants. We have been sequencing pictures of a plant’s growth from a seed and thinking about what a healthy plant needs to grow. We have continued to focus on the book ‘The Tiny Seed’ by Eric Carle. The children have been watching our classroom display grow a little bigger each day.   

On Thursday, we went to watch our Year 4 pupils perform Goldilocks & The Three Bears. It was an amazing performance and Pre-Reception were engrossed in the story and singing.  

Phonics

In Phonics, we have learnt how to pronounce the sound ‘l’. We have taught the children the rhyme ‘Open your mouth a little; put your tongue up to the top of your mouth, behind your teeth, and press lllll’.  However, this is a particularly challenging sound for young children to make and they find following this instruction equally difficult (by putting their tongue in front of and not behind their teeth).  To help with this, we have used mirrors to show the children where to place their tongues. 

Maths

In Maths, we continued to work on subitsing (saying how many without counting), 1 to 1 correspondence (counting a group of objects by assigning the numbers in order) and numeral recognition.

PSHE

In our Jigsaw PSHE lesson this week, we discussed what safe adults are and how to stay safe if they are not close by.  

At Farringtons, we aim to foster a love of reading. The Pre-Reception children take great pleasure in listening to stories. Next term we will be continuing ‘secret reader’ on Monday afternoons at 3.15pm. The aim of ‘secret reader’ is to show children that adults love reading too.

RECEPTION

Spring sprung in Reception this week.   

Understanding the World     

This week we have been exploring spring. We have been learning about how the weather, sunlight hours and how our environment changes. The children have compared spring to the other seasons and commented on what is similar and what is different. Additionally, we have enjoyed sharing books including ‘Hello Spring’ by Jo Lindley. 

Literacy  

Moving on to Literacy, we thought about spring and what happens during this season. We encouraged the children to think of their own sentences and record them, using capital letters and a full stop. We challenged them to use the vocabulary we had been exploring this week.   

Phonics     

This week we focused on longer words, words with s in the middle /z/ s, words ending –s and words with –es at end /z/. This included words visit, poison, foxes, and torches. Also, we continued to read longer sentences containing these words and writing them.

Maths     

This week in maths we continued to build on our previous knowledge of simple AB patterns from the autumn term. They were introduced to more complex patterns such as ABC and ABCD, where all the elements are different. Following this, we then progressed onto AABB, AAB and ABB patterns.  

Find out more about Early Years here.