One of our favourite books in pre-school is Dear Zoo, by Rod Campbell. A couple of weeks’ ago Mrs Sanders used it as a focus for the children’s learning and everyone enjoyed finding out about the different animals.
The children practised their pencil and scissor skills with snail spirals, and are now getting good with fine motor control.
In maths they continued to practise counting and had to solve lots of zoo related problems! The snakes came in different lengths and the children worked on identifying which ones were the longest, and shortest. It was fun counting the spots on the snakes too!
The lovely ladies from Starting Well visited to teach the children about keeping their teeth clean. They brought some extra-large teeth and let them clean them with extra-long brushes. They also played a game using colour matching boards. We are grateful to them for their visit.
The children had great fun using puppet animals to retell the story of Dear Zoo, and trying to remember which animal was next and talking about why the animal were suitable for us as a pet, or not.
Around the classroom, the children used different methods of construction to build cages houses for the zoo animals. This activity got them to begin thinking about problem solving, and to understand that we can all have different ideas.
In phonics last week the class practised their listening skills, listening to first, middle and last animal sounds and guessing who made which sound.
The children were also very busy looking after our new wormery. They are enjoying putting in their fruit and vegetable scraps from snack time and looking at how the worms are munching them up.
