Tag Archives: Literacy

Welcome to our story corner 🧸 📚

We have been very busy in the home room today, setting up a cosy book corner. The children started off by choosing their favourite stories from our library cupboard, selecting a variety of books that sparked their imagination.

“The scary shark looks like this.”

”I have this one at home, it’s my favourite.”

We then got started on choosing puppets for our story corner.

”Let’s have incy wincy”

”I like this one, it has little red riding hood and the wolf”

We sang some of the children’s favourite nursery rhymes and then choose our rhyme of the week, which was wind the bobbin up 🧵.

”Wind the bobbin up is my favourite”

”I like when we sing it really fast”

We then had lots of fun reading stories, singing and playing with the puppets in our new area. Well done to the children for helping set it up, great job!

Mark making in the garden

In our garden, the children have been exploring and developing their mark making skills. recently, the children have been exploring patterns and different ways to make them.

At our provocation area, the children were using flour and paint brushes to copy and create patterns…

the children were also exploring mark making in the gross motor art area of the garden today by using the cars to create patterns on paper with paint…

Over the next few weeks, we will be developing our mark making skills through various experiences outdoors and exploring and developing our knowledge of patterns in our environment.

Scotland Stories – Book week Scotland 2022

Today is the start of Book Week Scotland 2022. This year the theme is Scotland Stories – traditional Scottish tales and legends.
We introduced Book week Scotland in our Noisy/Quiet room by sharing traditional and Scottish books with our children.

We picked which story we liked best and settled down, nice and comfy, to read them together.

One of the Scottish stories the children picked to read was about bagpipes. Some of the children were keen to find out more about Bagpipes. Luckily Gail was on hand to show us videos of her family members who had visited Cart Mill previously to play the bagpipes for us.

It was a fantastic learning experience for the children to relate the story book to a real life event.
After we brushed our teeth, we read another story. This one was about the Lock Ness monster. Some of our children had the opportunity to paint their very own Loch Ness monster after reading the story in the Studio Room.

Book Bug came to visit the Noisy/Quiet room and shared a Scottish story about a girl named Katie Morag. Emma told the children that she used to read this story when she was at school a very long time ago.


We even had a wee cuddle of Bookbug as we shared the story.

We have enjoyed listening to the Scottish stories both as part of a group and on our own.

Reading stories are so much fun and are a fantastic way to promote the early literacy skills our our children. Books hold vast learning opportunities. Reading books promotes vocabulary expansion, introducing new words. Books also helps to increase imagination and creativity. Reading stories together also helps to Improve concentration and memory skills. And many more skills all from reading stories.
I wonder what other learning opportunities we will have through the week as we celebrate Book Week Scotland across each of our playrooms/gardens within Cart Mill.

What animals can you hear?

Today in the noisy quiet room the children took part in a listening activity. Following our current interest of ‘the farm’ we tested our knowledge of what animal sounds we could identify. These included farm animals and other animals in the wider world.   


Using an animal sounds CD and matching picture cards we got to work. First we looked at the animal card and identified the animal. Then together we made the sound we thought it would make. Next we listed to the animal sound on the CD to see if we were correct.  We all used our voices to make some really good animal sounds.

Once we were more familiar with the animal sounds we decided to challenge ourselves a little more.   This time we played the sound first and then selected what animal it was from the cards displayed. We worked together as a team to identify all the animals displayed.

“I think it’s a guinea pig”

“Cow”

“It’s a big rooster”

“That’s a turkey, it’s like a chicken”

Everyone did a fantastic job using their listening and talking skills to develop their knowledge of animal sounds. Well done everyone!

Visiting the library

We enjoyed a lovely visit to Busby library this morning. While walking to the library, we discussed what type of stories we like and which books we might choose.
Once we arrived we chose a book each and settled down to read them. We discussed what we thought the story might be about by looking at the covers then started to explore the books.

We enjoyed reading a story called There’s a Shark in my Bath altogether. I asked the children what they would do if they found a shark in their bath and they responded
“I would run away.”
“I would give him into trouble.”
“I would put him on the naughty step because he’s not allowed in my bath.”

Then Peter from the library also read us a lovely story about a Penguin.

We even got to dance like a penguin 🐧

Let us entertain you!

We have had a busy day in our Studio. We have explored our creativity and imagination through art and storytelling.
Using a selection of junk and art materials we  were able to build our own puppet theatre.


We shared and discussed what our favourite fairy tale stories were and who our favourite characters from popular stories were. We then listened to some stories before creating our own puppets. Using our great craft and motor skills when glueing, sticking, cutting and drawing  we made our very own puppets all ready for the premier of our puppet show performances.


“ I’m making a fairy for my story”

” Sleeping beauty is my favourite so I’m making Aurora “

Once our audience settled, we began our performances! We sat very patiently and demonstrated good listening skills while we all had a turn of being the puppeteer. For some stories we needed some  help from a friend to puppeteer alongside us as it got a bit tricky trying to hold all the characters at once!
We used our loud speaking voices to introduce our characters and the name of our stories we would be re-enacting. Some of us were a little shy and nervous to begin but when it came to our turn our confidence shone and we were able to re-tell familiar and popular stories using our own words such as ‘The Three Bears’, ‘Goldilocks’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Some of us were able to make our own stories up using our puppets we created.

Well done boys and girls you have been great entertainers! We all enjoyed listening and watching your stories and had so much fun with our puppet theatre, why not give this a go at home? You could make up your own puppets and stories!

Bookbug comes to visit Cart Mill!

We are so lucky that Bookbug came to visit us at Cart Mill today! We welcomed him with our “Hallo” song.

Next, it was time to choose a puppet from our Bookbug basket! It was so exciting to take our turn and use the puppet we had chosen to guess which song we would sing next.

We waited very patiently until it was our turn to guess the song.

It was so much fun to bounce our puppets on the lycra to see how high they could jump!

Finally it was time to end our Bookbug with one of our favourite stories.  Our story had lots of rhyming words for us to practice!

We love when Bookbug comes to visit!

 

 

Let’s have fun with Syllables!

Today in  our new ‘noisy and quiet’ room the children have been busy exploring the noisy side using musical instruments and their voices. We all joined together and  slowly clapped out the number of syllables in each of our names and counted how many there were. We found that most  of us had two,  and some of us only had one, so we decided to clap to our second names too. We discovered that most of us had three syllables in our second name’s. The children were able to recognise and clap out the number of syllables in their own names and were able to count out their  friends names.
“my name has two”


“ I have three  syllables  in my name “


“ I have more in my second name”

We then decided we would choose our favourite musical instruments and use them to develop our skills further.

“ I am going to choose the drum”

 
We had lots of instrument to choose from.

“I  am going to count my name using the maracas”

The children were learning to develop their vocabulary,  pre -phonics skills, and understanding of sounds and patterns within words through play. They were able to listen and respond to instructions whilst showing respect for each other through sharing and taking turns.



“ I can count out my syllables  on the wooden sound maker”

“ I am going to use the big drum”

“I am enjoying playing on the big  drum and making sounds”.



We even found out we can count out syllables on the piano. WOW!

Why not try it at home! You could use compound words that form two words such as: sunset , hotdog,  snowman or postman. To start with children just need to be able to recognise syllables by clapping, stamping or jumping for each syllable.  We had lots of fun dividing words into syllables. Why not give it a try at home and let us know how you got on. Have fun playing with words!

 

 

 

 

Sharing stories in spring

Today in the Home room was all about stories. We enjoy exploring stories together in our story area.
We like sharing stories together in different ways. We can share stories as part of a group, listening to a story being read by an adult.

When we read stories together, we are learning about taking turns, when to talk and when to listen, learning new vocabulary and sharing our thoughts and feelings as part of a group.
Today we discussed all things Spring during our story. We read about big and little nut brown hare sharing their ideas about Spring. We discussed our ideas and found out it’s “when the sun gets a little warmer” and “I know it’s Spring because it’s my mummy’s birthday in Spring”.
We can also explore stories with our friends, forming our own ideas about what the story can be about from looking at the pictures. If we recognise the book we can use our recall skills to retell the story.

Sometimes we can use visual aids to help us read a story. Visual aids such as puppets are a great way for our visual learners to interact with the story. Today the Gruffalo was helping read the story all about his adventures in the deep dark wood.

Sometimes we don’t even need a book to tell a story. We can use our imagination with different visual aids to bring our own stories to life, such as puppet shows.

We can also use role play to act out as characters from familiar stories, our become our own characters.
Story telling has so many learning opportunities for our children, it’s great to tell these stories in a way that captures the interests of our individual children.

What way do you like to share stories together at home?

World Book Day

We have had lots of fun celebrating World Book Day here at Cart Mill!

We sang our favourite songs and rhymes such a Twinkle Twinkle, Incy Wincy Spider,  Wheels on the Bus and Humpty Dumpty during Book Bug with Emma and Gail.

We had to work together as a team to keep Incy Wincy Spider up in the air! We were so excited to guess what was inside the box and which song we would sing next!

We did lots of bending and stretching following the actions of Head, Shoulders, Knees andToes and Peter Hammer with Gail.

Thank you so much to our parents and children who recorded their favourite stories to share with us.  We really enjoyed watching them on our big screen!

Gail read us a lovely story called the Wonderful World of Weather.  We have chatted about our favourite stories and read some of our favourite books.

Our budding authors have created some potato characters and stories of their own.  Other children have made their favourite characters from books. How many can you recognise?