A very busy term in Nursery

The children in Nursery have now all settled well into our daily routines and are really enjoying the activities we undertake in our sessions.   

The children have all worked very hard over the last few weeks and are happy and excited by any new experiences they can explore.   

The children have shown us how creative and artistic they are.   They have developed friendships and are learning to play and learn with each other well.

Just a few of the happy times we have spent leaning during the Autumn Term.   

We can't wait for more adventures in 2020!

EYFS and Year 1 Maths Parent Workshop

Today we welcomed parents from Reception and Year 1 to come and learn about how to support the children in developing number sense and fluency.

Here are some of the key messages from the workshop:

•   Working with larger numbers does not necessarily make your child a better     mathematician. Focus on your child being fluent with numbers to 10.

•   Being able to count is not the same as understanding the true value of a number.

•   Playing, talking and experiencing number is much more important than pen and paper work. Play games and ask questions such as: ‘Why is this?’; ‘How do you know?’; ‘Could you do this in another way?’.

•   Try to avoid counting whenever possible. Ask children to group objects to help them to work out the total, for example a child may not be able to recognise six objects but if grouped in two groups of three this may help.

•   Use egg boxes for ten frames, milk bottle tops, dominoes and dice to help children recognise numbers from pictures.

We played a variety of games using dominoes, dice, tens frames and dot cards. Here are some links to some of the games which you may wish to try at home.

Dominoes: https://nrich.maths.org/1200

·     Roll and race: http://thisreadingmama.com/free-roll-race-number-sense-games/

·     Dice games: http://nrich.maths.org/public/leg.php?code=5051

·    Tens frame games: https://nrich.maths.org/10742

If you would like to find out more about developing early number sense then this is a great article which also explains how dot cards can be used: https://nrich.maths.org/2477

A big thank you to parents who were able to attend and for showing so much enthusiasm. Please do come and see me if you would like further information.

Mrs James

Reception`s amazing dinosaurs and our Open hour for parents

Thank you to all of our Reception parents who came into school on Wednesday 26th April for our Open Hour session. 

Our focus was Phonics and we aimed to demonstrate a variety of ways in which children can learn - both suitable for using at school or at home.

  Firstly the children showed their parents how we practise `Dough Disco` to improve our fine motor control and we demonstrated a typical daily Phonics session where we practised saying and writing some of our Phase 2 and 3 sounds as well as singing their related song and performing their related action. We practised saying some of our tricky words using silly voices and then challenged ourselves and our parents to think of words beginning with `w`- many thanks to the brave parents who joined in!  Following that we sounded out, read and wrote words beginning with `w` and ended by reading sentences with `w` words and other tricky words. 

We then tried out a variety of phonics and fine motor activities around the classrooms- listed below for you to try out at home.

reading words and matching them to a picture

reading words and matching them to a picture- both are attached to a lock or a key, then use the key to unlock the matching lock

reading sentences and matching them to a picture

identifying a picture and matching it to it`s beginning sound ( written on a clothes peg)

using a play dough  `sausage` to make letters

hunting for coins in the sand- reading the words on the coins and sorting the words into `real `or `made up` words

putting letters into alphabetical order

saying words, making them with magnetic letters then writing them down 

writing phase 3/ high frequency words into our Busy Books and making sentences with them

Buried Treasure game- reading 'real' and 'made up' words on coins and sorting them into the treasure chest or the bin

exploring the Letter-join website on our class iPads 

fishing for phonemes in oats

sentence building with the wooden blocks- reading the word on each block and rearranging blocks to unscramble the sentence

using a phoneme frame, write the phase 3 word to match the picture

writing our high frequency words on tinfoil 

letter formation practise with the magnetic blocks 

Please try the `dough disco`, `jolly phonics`, `letterjoin` and `phonicsplay`activities at home- using the following website links

Youtube- search for `dough disco`

Youtube- search for `jolly phonics songs in correct order`

                                      http://www.letterjoin.co.uk

Letter-join. Cursive handwriting resource for school and home. www.letterjoin.co.uk Letter-join is an on-line resource for teaching cursive handwriting at school and at home. It uses interactive animations to demonstrate joined-up letter formation ...

                                        http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk   - click on `free phonics play` button

PhonicsPlay - Phonics games, planning, assessments and ... www.phonicsplay.co.uk A site packed with interactive phonics games, phonics planning, assessment ideas and many teaching ideas and resources to help children to learn to hear phonemes ...

We also all enjoyed showing our families the fantastic dinosaurs that the children had made at home during the holidays. The children have all shown them, named them and described them using the names of 3D shapes. Well done Reception! We are so proud of your hard work !

Year 3 at `Singing Connections`

On Thursday 8th December, 17 children represented Year 3 at a Singing Connections workshop at the Custard factory in Digbeth. This opportunity was provided by Birmingham Music Service and our children had a  very enjoyable day learning new songs and games designed to enhance and extend our learning in all areas of the curriculum. We will be sharing our new activities with the rest of the school next term.
Our children were extremely enthusiastic and participated very well all day, receiving compliments from the organisers and other schools.
 Many thanks to Mr Haycock for transporting us there and back in the school minibus and to Mrs Bundy for her support, care and enthusiasm all day.

Open Hour in Reception

We had a lovely time in Reception on Wednesday 20^th April when we invited our families in for an `Open Hour`. We enjoyed showing them how we `plan, do and review` our activities and how we identify the skills we are practising, using our `Achievesaurus dinosaurs` to ensure that we become effective learners.

We were also very proud to show off our Dinosaur exhibition of the amazing dinosaurs we had made from different 3D shapes at home. Thank you so much to our families for helping us to create such fantastic models and for joining us in our classes!