Nursery News Spring 1 2014 Welcome back and a warm welcome to all our new parents and children. We will be continuing our learning this half term, listening and retelling traditional stories, including The Three Little Pigs and the Gingerbread Man. We will be listening to the story, watching the story, acting out the story and making props for our role play. Please encourage your child to retell the story to you. Can they describe the story, the setting, tell you about the characters or what happens in the story, at the beginning, middle or the end?
Nursery Blog As a way of keeping you informed of some of the learning that takes place in nursery, we are going to be developing a Nursery Blog page on the Monteney website: www. monteneylearning.org. The Nursery Blog will be a quick and easy way for you to comment on the posts and we look forward to receiving your feedback. There are already a number of class blogs on the website so please have a look at them to see how they are successfully working in school. For this to happen we would be very grateful if you could sign a permission slip in nursery.
Monteney Primary School Issue 3 January—March 2014
Inside this issue: Welcome
1
Nursery Blog
1
Skills for Learning 2 Our Nursery Rules
2
Traditional Stories
2
Read Write Inc Reading at Nursery
3
Welly Boots
4
Nursery Dates
4
And finally
4
Skills for Learning What does listening look like? What do you need to do with your eyes, ears and brain when you listen? What does this feel like in our bodies when we focus our attention?
These skills for learning are what we start all our group learning sessions with. Following our listening rules helps everyone to learn
Eyes watching
Ears listening
Our Nursery Rules 1. You try hard 2. You are kind and helpful 3. You are gentle 4.You are honest 5. You listen well 6. You look after things
In our Nursery School we use a collection of stories to help all our children with understanding social rules. You may have heard your child talk about Mona the Monkey or Zelda the Zebra. These characters help us to make the right choices. As you can see from the rules, all the words we use are positive and this is the kind of behaviour that we praise and promote.
Body calm
Voice quiet
Read Write Inc As some of the children are showing a lot of interest in reading and writing, we feel they are ready to start learning more about letters and sounds. So this term we will be introducing Monteney’s phonic programme, Read Write Inc. These children will be learning to recognise the sounds letters make and learning how to write these letters correctly.
You may hear your child talk about Fred. Fred is our frog puppet who can only talk in ‘Fred Talk’. He can only say the individual sounds that make up a word . For example he can only say the sounds ‘m...u...m’ and the children will have to blend the sounds together to say the word ‘mum’. Playing word games at home can be fun and will help your child to become confident at reading and writing when they start full time school.
If you would like to know more about your child’s stage of development, please remember you can always talk to their Key Person or alternatively email us at montnursery@monteney.sheffield.sch.uk.
Reading at Nursery The books in our Nursery Library are available for all the children to choose. Please let us know if there are any favourites that can be included in the Library as we want to encourage all children to read regularly. We will be introducing a Reading Diary for all and the children will be able to select these next week. The Reading Diary contains some helpful suggestions of how you can support your child with their reading, making it fun and interesting. It also has some space for you to record which books your child has read, including books from home as well as Nursery and make some comments such as which part of the book they liked best, what made them choose that book We will collect these Diaries at the end of term to allow us to make a comment. The first collection will be on Wednesday 19th of February.
Be Prepared! At this time of year we all need to be prepared for the cold, windy, snowy or wet weather! So we can continue to access the outdoor learning environment whatever the weather, please remember to bring your child’s welly boots to nursery, along with a waterproof and warm outdoor coat, hat and gloves (all with their name written on the inside, please).
Nursery Diary Dates Wednesday 22nd January
School Attendance Officer will around in the morning and afternoon to share news about the Schools new attendance initiative, OTIS (the ostrich)
Wednesday 19th February 3.30—6.30 pm Thursday 20th February 3.30—5.30 pm
Nursery Parent meetings
Friday 21st February
Last day of term
Monday 3rd March
Start of new term for children
And finally please remember … Our dedicated email address for Monteney Nursery is: montnursery@monteney.sheffield.sch.uk