This week in preschool 31.10.22

Welcome back!

We hope you all had a fantastic half term. We enjoyed lots of family time with fun-filled days of pumpkin picking, autumn walks, visits to parks, swimming, bike rides and baking. We are looking forward to seeing you all and hearing what the children got up to over the week. If you would like to add an observation with some photos of your child enjoying activities over half term, they will be able to show and tell their friends all about them on the big screen.

This half term our new Character Education Gateway is 'Leadership'. This week we will begin our new focus story, 'The Enormous Turnip'. We will use this story to initiate discussions with the children about teamwork and leadership. We will be asking the questions, 'How did the farmer reach his goal?', 'Do you think the farmer is a good leader?' and 'Can you explain why?' We will also discuss teamwork and how the characters in the story act as a team to achieve their goal. We hope this story inspires the children to practise their collaborative skills and we will be praising children when we see them working together and showing good leadership skills such as clear communication, good organisation and fairness in their play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb7TWEyoDFk

As always, we will be learning some Makaton to accompany this story. Please click the link above to see a video of 'The Enormous Turnip' told by Mr Tumble where you can learn some Makaton with your child if you wish. We will also listen to a signed story this week through which we will learn some Makaton related to farms. Please follow the link below if you would like to have a look at it at home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFxYatusSf4

In phonics this week, we will be focussing on rhythm and rhyme. We will be reading rhyming stories, singing nursery rhymes and playing rhyming pairs games. We will also introduce rhyming strings to the children and will begin encouraging them to have a go at saying a word that rhymes with a list of words such as, sat, mat, rat. Noticing rhythm is also important for children's developing phonic awareness and in Preschool we clap the syllables in new vocabulary we come across in stories. This is a great way to help children pronounce multi-syllabic words correctly and will help them to make good spelling attempts in the future. If you would like to support your child's awareness of rhyme at home this week then nursery rhymes are a really simple way to do so. Incy, Wincy Spider, Row, Row, Row Your Boat, The Grand Old Duke of York, Hickory and Dickory, Dock are just a few examples.

In Maths this week, we will be continuing to sing our song to help us learn to count to 20. We will then be focusing on the number 4 this week. This will involve looking at what four looks like as a group of objects, how to recognise the numeral 4 and how to make marks to represent the number 4. At home, you could support your child by counting 4 objects/toys and then putting them in different arrangements. Encourage your child to see that an arrangement of 4 objects can look very different and not always in a square like on a dice.

In RE this half term, we will be learning about the school value, Inspire. Over the next few weeks, we will learn about the life of Jesus and His 12 Disciples and will discuss the different ways Jesus inspired others through His stories, teachings and actions. We will then think about people who inspire us and how we can inspire others too.

What a busy week! We hope you all have as much fun this week as we plan to.

Best wishes,

The Preschool Team