Nursery Seahorses Newsletter Spring 1 2019
Wonderful Water!
Happy New Year! We will start our new topic by finding out what the children already know about water. In Early Years, we like to follow the interests of the children, as this enables the children to fully engage with their learning. The key areas will include animals that live in the water, what water is used for and where water comes from. Vocabulary will be a focus area, as always. We will be introducing and explaining topic words throughout the half term, expanding the range of words that the children can use and understand. Here are the topic word mats we will be using. Look at the words and talk to your child about them. How many do they already know and understand? If you could work on any unfamiliar words at home, that would be really helpful.
Physical development will be a focus area this half term. This includes movement the children do whilst outside but also the fine motor development linked to writing and mark making. Squiggle While You Wiggle is the fun way we introduce the children to early writing. Watch out on Tapestry for videos! For the newest Seahorses, we will be encouraging them to make marks, modelling how to draw shapes for a particular effect, holding their pencil using a tripod grip. The older Seahorses will be focusing on name writing. Some children will do this on a large scale on the interactive whiteboard while others will be learning to form letters correctly on individual whiteboards. Any writing the children do at home, please share on Tapestry.
Counting and number recognition have been priority areas during the Autumn term and most children are picking these up well. To develop their understanding of numbers even further we will be looking at changing quantities by adding or taking away, the foundations for later work on addition and subtraction. After counting the objects and identifying 'how many', the children will be asked to say if the quantity has changed after 1 or 2 objects are added or removed. Some children will begin to record their answers, helping them to develop more confidence in number formation. When counting, we encourage the children to touch each object and move it to one side to show it has been counted to develop accuracy. Here is a counting game for you to play at home.
Water is a fascinating resource for children. They love to be in the water getting wet and this lends itself to lots of investigations, such as 'how can we change water?'and 'can we keep teddy dry?' Watch out for our experiments where the children will become scientists for the day and carry out investigations to answer their questions.