This week we have begun our ‘letter of the week’. Here is a clue to our first letter:

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It’s the letter m! Rather than the name of the letter (’em’), we focus on the sound it makes (‘mm’), as this phonic knowledge is important when learning to read and write. As well as writing m outside, the children used our new chalks to draw other things as well.

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And to draw around each other.

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Next week we will be looking at the letter ‘a’. Again we will be concentrating on the sound (‘a’ as in apple), rather than the name (‘ay’).

Other outdoor activities this week included doing a lot of important work on our tree stump.

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Not all hard physical graft is outside though. We had some very energetic moving when we did our dancing footprint activity!

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To link these physical activities to our topic, at circle time the children took turns to move in different ways to numbers in the number line.

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Learning to recognise numbers is an important step and it can be good to point out numbers that you see in the environment (such as those on road signs and in shops) when out and about with your child.

On Monday evening the staff were lucky enough to receive some training from the Children’s Speech and Language Service. We had a session which focused on cued articulation, which is a system of visual cues that aid children to make the correct letter sounds. It was really invaluable and very interesting and we are currently beginning to implement it at preschool. 😃