20.01.23 The Magic Paintbrush
20.01.23
This week our focus story was ‘The Magic Paintbrush’ by Julia Donaldson. This rhyming book has given the children lots of opportunities to join in with rhyming and learning about the Chinese folk story.
Each week we are focusing on a key text which makes up our ‘Super Six’ library of books which are linked to our half termly topic. We read these stories everyday during the week and focus on VIPERS questions to really think about the story in detail.
VIPERS stands for:
V – vocabulary
I – infer
P – predict
E - explain
R – retrieval
S – sequencing
The children’s answers are recorded on speech bubbles and are added to our :learning journey’ display which features different examples of activities we have completed and focused on based around the story.
Our role play area is still very busy and a popular choice during continuous provision. We have displayed lots of independent writing on our writing display wall and it is great to see how many children have used the phonics they are learning within their writing.
This week our rainbow challenges have been:
Literacy – use phonics to write the animals names from the story of The Great Race
Maths – find the numbers on the Chinese numbered flashcards and put them in order
Fine motor – cut around the Chinese envelope outline, fold and glue together
Funky fingers – cut out the different shapes and position them to make a rabbit for this years year of the rabbit
Creative – decorate a jar with red and yellow tissue paper to make a Chinese lantern
Phonics – read the CVC words and circle the matching picture
ICT – complete the Chinese jigsaw puzzle
This week we have started ‘Drawing Club’ a program which has been developed by Greg Bottrill. Each week will have a different focus which follows this sequence; a story book, a traditional tale and then an animation. We will focus on the input during the first two days of the week and discuss a key character and also the setting before moving on to ‘going on an adventure’. Every day the children draw something linked to the focus and talk about their drawing and come up with a sentence they would like to write. This approach gives the children ownership of their learning which really gets them excited to bring their pictures to life.
During these sessions we also focus on key vocabulary linked to the story. Our story this week has been ‘Not Now Bernard’ by David McKee. We have talked about different words and added actions to help us remember them and what they mean. Our words this week have been; astonished, gobble, destroy, fiercesome and splatter. Ask your child to show you what they mean – they really are so animated and are beginning to be able to explain what each one means. It would be great to know any feedback.
‘Drawing Club’ has been extremely popular this week and all the children have been so eager to come to the table to draw and write. They have particularly enjoyed using the special rainbow pencils and glitter crayons and are all really proud of their achievements this week.
This week the nursery children have continued with their mini topic of ‘people who help us’ in their TWINKL phonics and have been learning a new song and trying to listen carefully to initial sounds within words. In maths the children have been playing games to quickly recognise different representations of 1, 2 and 3 and see how quickly they can do this.
We have also introduced ‘Ten Town’ to our morning session where we have been excited to explore who lives on Ten Town. We have met; King One, Tommy Two, Thelma Three, Freddie Four and Fiona Five. We have listened to their individual stories, practised singing their songs and began to learn their rhymes to help us with number formation. If we have had time we have enjoyed playing their games too.
Reception have continued to work really hard in their phonics groups with Miss Smurthwaite, Mrs Whaley and Mrs Parker and have been trying really hard with sounding out and blending and reading words they know. We have also been using these sessions to practice writing words using ‘Fred Fingers’ too which is really helping with our writing during other activities throughout the week.
As this is the week leading up to Chinese New Year we have been learning about how Chinese children celebrate and have watched clips from CBeebies and on Thursday we enjoyed trying some noodles and prawn crackers whilst we listened to Chinese music. Below is the link we used to find out all about this special time of year.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/chinese-new-year
Next week we will be moving onto our ‘Dinosaur’ topic and our super six story is going to be ‘Harry and his Bucketful of Dinosaurs’ by Ian Whybrow. We think it is going to be a firm favourite with St George Class and we are looking forward to finding our lots of facts about the different dinosaurs over the next 3 weeks.