At Milngavie Nursery we use a Word Aware approach to explore books, storytelling, characters and new vocabulary. We select titles based on children’s interests and design learning opportunities around their ideas. For December we are exploring the themes and vocabulary from ‘Stick Man’ (Julia Donaldson).
Stick Man goes for a jog one day but things don’t quite go as planned. He finds himself in all sorts of troubling situations as he tries to get back to his family.
Initial discussions with the children to get our project started!
As well as reading the book together we will also use these beautiful Stick Man pebbles to tell and retell the story.
Parents as Partners in Learning –
We will focus on one word per week based on topics covered in the story.
Week 1 – Stick (w/c 2nd Dec)
Week 2 – Family (w/c 9th Dec)
Week 3 – Santa (w/c 16th Dec)
You can support Word Aware learning in a number of ways!
- Ask your child to tell you about the Stick Man story, discuss some of the characters and share their favourite part.
- Help your child to learn the ‘Word of the Week’ by clapping out the syllables and saying the word over and over – we say it loudly and quietly, fast and slow. This is a fun way to learn any new words.
- Encourage your child to describe what each word means, use it in a sentence and think of other words that mean the same (or a similar) thing.
- Talk about words that rhyme.
