Jungle Explorers!

We made binoculars out of toilet and kitchen roll tubes so we could explore the jungle! We recalled all the different animals we have learnt about over the last few weeks and played a game with a talking partner where we took it in turns to describe an animal for our partner to guess.

Then we used our fantastic writing skills from phonics to write some clues for our chosen animal.

Peek-a-boo!

We Love Phonics!

Reception are getting better all the time with their sounds and can now say them at speed each session. We have been focussing the last few weeks on listening for sounds in words and blending sounds together to help us with our reading.

We have played the 'Please, Mr Crocodile' game, only being allowed to cross the river if we have the object sounded out by 'Mr Croc'! You could play a variation of this game at home by finding objects with simple sounds (s-o-ck, c-u-p, p-e-n, f-e-l-t, b-r-u-sh) and sounding them out. (You'll find yourself walking round the house sounding out all the objects you see in no time, and be amazed at how many objects you can find for this simple game!)

We have also been writing the simple sounds on picture sound cards, practising our letter formation too. We did this in a phonics session, and then many children chose to continue this activity in the writing corner during planning time.

Finally, we've been enjoying playing some of those online phonics games that were sent out in the phonics pack to parents. For this one, we have to say the sounds in the word and blend them together to know which picture to click on. This has been really popular in planning time, and children are becoming more confident with blending sounds, helping each other too. Soon, we'll be able to recognise words by sight as we see them more often!

Story Maps

We know the sequence of Monkey Puzzle so well now, we can even draw story maps of the events in the story! We can then tell the story using our story map to help us!

 

You can do this for any story - Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, The Smartest Giant in Town, even your own story!

It helps with sequencing events in a story, and encourages fluency in being able to verbalise a story, leading to greater fluency for thinking and writing stories.

Why don't you try one yourself?

Rhyming Paper Chains

We are still loving reading Monkey Puzzle, and can remember a lot of the words now. We've noticed that it is written in rhyme and enjoy listening out for and saying the rhyming words. So, we played a rhyming pairs game in small groups, using our phonics to sound out and blend the words, and then wrote our own rhyming words to make paper chain vines for our jungle corner! I wonder what rhyming words you can think of.

No, no, no! That's a...!

After becoming illustrators, we thought we'd try our hand at a being authors! We decided we wanted to add a new animal to the Monkey Puzzle, so we thought of fantastic descriptions like spiky, sharp teeth, claws, long tail and large. Can you guess what it is yet?

Of course! It's a crocodile!