Autumn walk

We went for an Autumn walk around the school grounds, observing the changes around us.

 We noticed that the leaves had changed colour and found green, yellow, orange, brown and red leaves on different trees.

We collected the leaves that had fallen on the ground to take back to use in class.

We found that during Autumn there are berries and apples growing on the trees.

We collected the fallen apples to use for a variety of activities.

Counting and matching.

Weighing...

Floating/sinking fun...

Ordering numbered apples.

We thought about the Autumn colours we saw in the fruits and leaves and then explored colours making our own Autumn trees.

We selected one of the Autumn colours and painted this on one of our hands. We printed this onto our tree to represent the leaves. We then chose a different Autumn colour and painted this onto the other hand and again printed this onto the tree. The children then rubbed their hands together to mix the two colours, predicting beforehand what colour it might make. The children were both surprised and excited that they had managed to create a new colour by mixing two different colours together. They then printed this 'new' colour onto their tree.

We  added our pictures of our families onto our Autumn trees.

We have been using Autumn objects to explore weight. We have used balances to investigate heavier, lighter and objects that balance. One big misconception is that the bigger the object, the heavier it will be. I gave the children a challenge to test this. There were 3 different size boxes, each containing an Autumn object. The boxes were all wrapped in white paper and the children could first estimate which was the heaviest/lightest and then were able to pick up each box to check their ideas. I encouraged the children to draw/write what they thought was inside each box. On Friday we opened the boxes and the children were really surprised. In the biggest box I had placed the lightest object ( a leaf) and in the smallest box I had placed the heaviest object(an apple). 

Reading cafe

Our first reading cafe of the school year was held today.

The focus was on how we teach phonics in EYFS Reception class. We began by showing our Mummy's, Daddy's, Grandma's and Grandad's how we learn our new sounds. We introduced them to our phonics friend Fred the frog!

We showed our visitors how we use 'My turn', 'your turn'and 'turn to your partner to reinforce oral sounding out of sounds and then how to segment the sounds e.g. "C , a, t" before blending them and pushing them back together to make the whole word "cat".

There were then a series of activities which the children and their guests could take part in which we use in class to reinforce our phonics and early literacy skills.

Fishing for phonics.

What sounds can you catch? Can you find them on your own board?

Did you get a good catch?!

What sound did you catch?

Feeding Fred - Fred only talks in sounds, so you have to feed Fred the cards by saying the sounds you see e.g. C, a, t'.

Playdough fun- making our letter shapes by rolling flat and pressing the shapes on or using our hands to make sausages.

Using sound cubes to find the sounds to match the word and then joining them together to make the whole word.

Wring our sounds in a variety of ways. 

Using whiteboards.

Using sand trays or glitter trays.

On chalk boards.

Tracing sound cards.

And word cards.

Marble run sounds.

Sound puzzles.

And sharing sound books and stories....

We hope you all had fun and that you learnt a little bit more about how we tach phonics in Reception.