Our second half term in the Foundation Stage…
We began our second half term at school with an exciting first week learning about Bonfire Night, writing poems and creating our own firework artwork. The children learnt to use recycled and different objects to print patterns and shapes. They enjoyed combining their knowledge of repeating patterns within their firework artwork.
We read the story of Rama and Sita and acted out the story with the children before engaging in making clay diva lamps, Rangoli patterns and learning about Hindu culture. We then began our floor book with the question “What do we know about celebrations?”
The children worked with their families at home to create their own celebrations boxes. We used our celebration boxes to talk with our friends about the similarities and differences between our families and celebrations. The children learnt how to wait their turn to speak with a friend, share their ideas and listen to others. They learnt about the different family customs within our class and we captured our learning in our floor book to answer the question ‘What do we celebrate?’
We had a special delivery from Kipper arrive in our class. Kipper had brought a birthday box to help us celebrate Kipper’s birthday and he sent us a number challenge to complete too. We shared the story of Kipper’s birthday during shared reading
For our number challenge we had to estimate how many candles, hats, balloons, buns and hats were in Kipper’s birthday box. We had great fun learning to estimate and count reliably the number of party objects in the box.
We celebrated Kipper’s birthday by writing cards, learning to spell the words to, love, from and our names. We read instructions how to make sandwiches as part of our shared reading. We are beginning to blend to read the words put, on, jam, then, next, to help us to read simple instructions. We made party hats and decorations for the classroom and on Friday we had a party to celebrate Kipper’s birthday. It was great fun and we all ate the picnic food that we had made ourselves.
We have been working hard this half term to learn the letters of the alphabet and blend them together to read three letter words. We have been playing games every day in pairs and with the adults to help us to learn to read words and spell words. We have been matching magnetic letters to pictures, playing interactive games on the Ipads and whiteboard and beginning to record the letters in writing.
We have been learning how to hold a pencil to write letter shapes. We have learnt how to use a ‘pinchy parrot’ grip to hold our pencils and are practising every week to form letters correctly and write them on lines during our handwriting sessions.