Little Wrens News – A Spooky Week!

Welcome back Little Wrens to a new half term. This half term our learning will focus on festivals and celebrations around the world. Halloween has been this week's focus..

In our literacy sessions, we have been on a pumpkin hunt. Using the text, 'We're Going on a Pumpkin Hunt' by Goldie Hawk, we created our own story map and have used actions to help us recall and retell the story. Despite meeting some spooky characters on the way, including, 'watchful green-eyed cats' and 'flying, flapping bats', we did manage to find a big pumpkin – phew! We have also enjoyed sequencing the characters the children saw on their hunt and drew a picture of the different characters.

To develop our communication and language skills, we explored a pumpkin. We used vocabulary, such as, hard, bumpy, cold, orange, big, to describe the outside of the pumpkin and, slimy, gooey, wet, cold, smelly, pumpkin seeds, to talk about the inside of the pumpkin. We were also introduced to new vocabulary, such as, stalk, skin, pulp.

Feelings and emotions have been the focus our our personal, social and emotional development. Using pumpkin emotion cards, we identified different feelings and emotions, we copied the different expressions and some of us were able to talk about their feelings. Mabel said, "Feeling loved makes me happy", Nancy said, "I feel excited when I go on holiday to cbeebies", Thea said, "I bit my tongues that made me feel sad".

We have enjoyed lots of activities to support our fine motor development, including wrapping wool to create a mummy, hammering and stabbing golf tees into pumpkins, thread wool to create a spider's web, made marks in shaving foam and used a scoop to fill containers with lentils.

To support our listening and attention skills, we have played a memory game. Using props from the story, we had to guess which item was missing. We have also shared stories daily with an adult.

During our mathematics sessions, we have been introduced to the number 3. We looked at different representations of three, the composition of three and have enjoyed singing 'When Goldilocks went to the house of the Bears' to support counting to three.

Nursery rhymes have been the focus of our phonic sessions and we have been working hard to listen for rhyme in words. This can be quite tricky to master, perhaps you could practise at home too.

It really has been a spooktacular week
Miss Gregory