This week we have been enjoying playing ‘Phoneme Pop.’  This is a great website for developing early literacy skills.  Even if the children are not yet naming the letters, they are learning to match letter shapes.  Please remember to always use the letter sounds with your children rather than the letter names.  For example, use ‘ah’ instead of ‘ai’ for the letter ‘a’.

You can access the website by clicking here.

We have not been using the garden this week as we are giving it time to recover from 80 pairs of jumping feet that have been sploshing and splashing in it recently! 🙂

This week we have been using the playground for outdoor play instead of the garden.  This has provided lots of wonderful opportunities for climbing challenges and taking risks.

Look at these cheeky climbing monkeys! 🙂

We all had the opportunity to share our favourite book with our friends.  We shared funny and good parts of our story and were eager to show our friends the pictures.

We have been using the ‘BeeBot’ app to extend our understanding of programming and using positional language.  You can download this for free in the app store.

As part of our pirate topic we have been learning about maps and have shown a particular interest in drawing our own maps.  We have been using positional language when we describe our maps.  To develop this further we have been using the ‘BeeBot’ programmable robots.  We have to instruct the robots to go forwards, backwards, left or right by pressing different buttons.  We have been doing lots of tricky problems solving!

We were delighted to have Alec’s Grandma visit us for another singing session.  She played the piano for us and we sang and dance.  We all enjoyed the active focus of all of the songs! Please click on the links below to see videos of us in action.  A huge thank to Alec and his Grandma.

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Many of us have shown an interest in hunting for treasure in the playground, garden and in the nursery.  We have also been eager to play a pirate game on the TouchTV and use the small world pirate toys.  A large group of us decided to plan a pirate topic.   We decided to focus on pirate treasure, maps and flags.  We have been having lots of fun exploring these new play contexts this week.  Please see the planning folder and the ‘Children’s Plans’ wall display for more information.