Dear Parents,

Welcome back, I hope you all had a restful break over Christmas and New Year. This term we are looking at ‘Under the Sea'. Along with colours and shapes our creative activities will have a sea theme. The children really enjoyed the experiments we did last term, especially the balloon races and making a volcano so they will be helping to choose activities from my science book.

After completing a' Sounds and Phonics' course with Kylie we are going to include lots of games which encourage listening skills and each week we will concentrate on a different area. Please see below for weekly details.

Stories will include Fidgety Fish stories, Hooray for Fish, The Teeny Weeny Tadpole and other sea linked tales.

Please do encourage the children to bring in something from home so they can show it to their friends and build on their confidence to talk to the group.

January 12 th – 16th Blue and Circles

We will be making an octopus, papier mache models and animal music and movement.

Environmental sounds will be covered during a listening walk and we will make a list of all the different sounds we have heard. We also will use descriptive words to describe sea animals and so if the children can identify the creature.

January 19 th – 23rd Orange and Squares

This week Sharks will feature in our creative model making and the story Smiley Shark will be read and we will talk about sharks and how they sense others in the sea and demonstrate this through a listening game.

Musical instruments will be used to play a sounds matching game and to repeat rhythms.

January 26th – 30th Yellow and Triangle

We will look and The Chinese new year and be making lanterns and Chinese dragons.

The children will use their bodies to make sounds, clapping, patting thighs etc in time to nursery rhymes and songs. They already know the beat for Humpty Dumpty. We will look at copying a sequence of sounds too.

February 2nd – 6th Green and Rectangles

Beautiful fish will be made using cellophane and tissue paper and even printing with a real fish.

Rhythm and rhyme is a huge area and children take a long time to understand rhyming words so we will use stories that rhyme and are repetitive. We will play rhyming games about making silly soup.

February 9th – 13th Red and Hearts

Valentines Day, so hearts and red will be used this week, and we will be looking at whales and what they eat.

Alliteration will be the focus this week with lots of stories introducing it, and making up nonsense sentences to show alliteration and stressing the initial sounds of words.