Our Week at Preschool 30.04.21

Another week of learning has passed us by.

In our personal, social and emotional development, we continued with our new HeartSmart unit 'I tell the truth'. This week, we learned that is it important to tell the truth. We listened to story 'The Truth According to Arthur' by Tim Hopgood. As we listened to the story, I paused and asked the children questions "Is Arthur telling the truth?" "What is Arthur trying to do with the truth?". We then talked about how 'The Truth' always comes back. Finally, we discussed 'What would we do?' and I am pleased to say that all the children said they would tell the truth and to quote one of our children "Even if we get in trouble, you should always tell the truth". Thank you for reminding us to 'always tell the truth' Boris.

During our well being time, we spent time drawing and painting to relaxing music. You can see some of our masterpieces in the photographs.

To support our communication and language development, we have continued to look at language within the story 'Jack and the Beanstalk' and we have also used props to retell the story. We have also been enjoying our daily phonics sessions in small groups, please see the 'activities' section on Tapestry for this weeks focus and how you can support your child at home.

We enjoyed playing the 'Moving Beans Game' as part of our physical development this week. I told the children that they were going to be beans. I explained that they need to listen to which type of bean they will be and move like that type of bean. For example, when I shout "Jumping Bean", we have to jump. I think our favourite was 'French bean', we walked on our tip toes and say "ooh la la". We have also continued with our dough disco and squiggle sessions, please see Tapestry in the 'activities' section for further information and how you can support this at home.

Following on from last week sessions, in our literacy development, we continued to speak a set of instructions to tell us 'How to grow a seed', focusing on using, first, then, next, after that and finally. It was lovely to observe children in their free play speak the set of instructions to their peers as they chose to plant a seed. We have enjoyed listening to the story 'Jack and the Beanstalk' during our story time this week and have discussed the characters within the story. In our writing activity, we have drawn a picture of the characters from the story, first we focused on the main characters and then some of us talked about and drew the secondary characters. Our older children have also been focusing on recognising and tracing/writing their names. For those children that are more confident in writing their name we have focused on letter formation using the RWI script.

We have continued to explore four sided shapes this week as part of our mathematics development. First we shared our four sided shape hunt finds from home and then we went on our own four sided shape hunt around the school grounds. We have been answering questions such as, "How do you know it is a square?" "What is the same/different (between the shapes square and rectangle)?". We are becoming so much more confident in answering questions. perhaps you could ask your child to explain to you the similarities and differences between the two shapes.

In our understanding of the world development, we have explored green beans. As we opened the beans we observed, "seeds", we discussed what we could do with the seeds "plant them", so, we planted them. We will explore the life cycle of a bean further next week. We have also observed some exciting changes to our seeds "Look the seeds are growing" and have been introduced to language, such as, root, shoot, germinate, grow.

As part of our RE development, we have been learning the assembly song 'Our God is a Great Big God'.

Within our expressive arts and design development, we have drawn and painted a beanstalk. To begin, we looked at some pictures of a beanstalk and talked about their features and then, I modelled the ways in which we could draw a beanstalk. After that, the children used a black pen to draw their beanstalk and finally, they painted their beanstalk. I was super impressed with their masterpieces!

During our free play, we have been measuring, made seasonal observations in the garden, we have enjoyed listening to stories, we have been mark making in a variety of ways, we have cooked up a storm in the kitchen, managed risks when climbing the trees and tyres and used our imaginations in abundance.

Another fantastic week of learning, thank you Preschool!

Enjoy your bank holiday weekend and I look forward to seeing you all again next week
Tara