Spring Term Week 3
Our focus this week has been literacy and Disco Thursday has made a return! The children love to dance and move and this builds confidence and strength. We had a lovely email last week from one of the local schools praising the children who started last September and letting us know the gross motor strength and co-ordination are key skills so we will be working hard on those areas over the coming months for all children.
Our planning has included exploring technology this week and sensory play in the afternoons, we have made a new letter tray each morning and the children have made some wonderful junk modelling creations which built on our teaching last week. They are an excellent group for playing and creating and sharing ideas and working together.
The Stars have been learning new rhymes and songs and moving lots and dancing and enjoying playing instruments. We have lots of lovely observations for them this week for the key workers.
The Sun and Moons have been working hard on recognising letters and listening to their sounds and this is the beginnings of them understanding letters make up words that can be read and sounded out. Pen grip is really important for writing so when you are at home making lists or drawing please correct your child’s pen grip – I will load a photo of a good pen grip onto Tapestry for you to have a look at!
The activities have included drawing and writing letters for our little Cully Bear, matching items to letter sounds, recognising the letter and the beginning of their name and being able to sound it out. Matching sounds to letters and writing those letters and using ideas from an old friend Robot Reg in our circle times.
Shared story reading is a really valuable tool for promoting language and literacy and a great time for promoting new vocabulary. We read every lunchtime and every afternoon, often repeating favourite books and talking about the stories too.
We have set up a multi cultural shop undercover which has kept us entertained on the rainy days and we would love more packaging for the shop please, ideally from around the world!
To promote exercise we have played games in the garden, and enjoyed garden club – digging and tidying our growing garden this week.
Next week we will be learning about Chinese New Year and trying lots of different foods from around the world, thank you for the donations from our families and if you have any other ideas for snack time from your homes and cultures for us we would love to hear them! amelia@cullomptonpreschool.org
Please keep an eye out for notifications from Tapestry – please do ensure you have those turned on as your key person has chosen the area for home learning/next steps for this half term and these will all come via the Tapestry app as an observation. We would love your feedback on the idea and any photos of you playing with your child using our ideas!