Home » EYFS – Newsletter – 09.02.24

EYFS – Newsletter – 09.02.24

It’s been a great end to a fantastic half-term this week! We have been ending our topic of Amazing Animals by looking at creatures of myth and legend. These included the ever popular unicorns, mermaid and dragons but also saw us take a look at some other creatures too.

On Wednesday, we had some unexpected animal visitors. As children arrived to school they reported hearing bees in the tree outside Reception, so we had our site supervisor Mr Coulson investigate. He found a (totally convincing) bee hive full of lively bees up in the tree and made arrangements for it’s safe removal. In the meantime, the children in Reception were put to work making signs to put up around school warning of the potential dangers on the bees in the trees! Thanks to their help, the only victim was poor Mr Verdi who sadly received an (again, totally convincing) bee sting to the finger and no further incidents were recorded. Luckily, by Thursday the bees had been safely rehomed to warmer climes in a lucky escape before Mrs Hunter got any ideas to add beekeeping to Mr Gambles duties!

Around the Reception class, we had a wealth of activities inspired by mythical creatures. The central display area featured a mysterious collection of objects (green fur, claws and scaly skin) and a strange bottle of green liquid. The children were left to speculate on what type of creature may have left such things behind – and we saw some lovely conversations and drawings of this curious creature. There was a reading challenge, asking the children to place centaurs and mermaids into a scene. Our creative area found many children choosing to design merfolk by adding shiny scales, hair and facial features of their own choosing. Maths work on measure was explored by comparing and ordering colourful snakes and creating chalk outline mermaids from the children themselves, which they then measured using large blocks. As we’ve also been investigating units of time this week, a popular challenge found children trying to feed worms to a bird within one minute.

Our Phonics sessions this week have introduced the long vowel sounds ‘ai’ (snail) ‘ee’ (cheese) and ‘igh’ (knight). There was lots of fun playing board games and hunting for phonemes out and about. The children have been working so hard to apply the skills they have acquired in their reading and writing this year.

Maths this week concentrated on using time language to think about how we measure time in different intervals. Inside children got to take on 30 second challenges to see how much they could achieve in this timespan, and in learning the names and order of the days of the week. Outside, the children were challenged to give instructions using time connectives such as first, next, after that and finally to instruct their friends to construct block towers and create fitness routines.

Monday’s shared drawing was a split vote between a unicorn and a mermaid, so we drew… a mermicorn! As you can see below, the children are really improving their care and control when drawing and we produced some marvellous pictures.

For our final Cookridge pet-of-the-week saw us visited by a DRAGON! Fortunately not a fire-breathing creature of ancient myth, but Class 2’s very own Spike. Spike is a Pogona lizard and the children loved getting a close-up look at this fascinating reptile and learning some facts about them.

Friday was a school-wide Dress to Express day with Reception coming in with some wonderful outfits. This day was part of a world-wide week raising awareness of Children’s Mental Health. As part of this week, we spent time talking about individual achievements and what makes us feel proud. We invited children to show us what makes them proud and we saw some fantastic results.