This week we thought about similarities and differences through a variety of ways.

On Monday we celebrated Odd Socks Day! We wore odd pairs of socks and talked about how we are all different, but being different makes us special. We played a game where children learned to notice their differences with others and another where children built fine motor skills by putting socks on a washing line with pegs. Children built their imagination and artistic skills by designing their own pairs of odd socks, and built their fine motor skills by cutting socks out. Our nursery rhyme of the day was “The Big Ship Sails”, which we reviewed several times throughout.

On Tuesday we played a circle time game requiring us to be careful listeners and discriminate the various sounds of animals, matching them to animals from our story, “Dear Zoo”. We also acted out the story “Dear Zoo” using masks. Our nursery rhyme of the day was “1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Once I caught a fish alive”. We acted the story out using giant foam numicon, singing along as we did!

On Wednesday, we thought about our story “Dear Zoo”, where a puppy makes the perfect pet. We talked about different pets and what pets have in common and what is different about different pets. We met Poppy and Pumpkin, the guinea pigs from Holly class, which was a big highlight! The children were all very gentle with the guinea pigs. Later in the day we talked about whether a lion would make a good pet and learned about the word “fierce”. Our nursery rhyme of the day was “5 Green Speckled Frogs”, which we acted out with frog masks, practising our counting skills as frogs were subtracted one by one.

On Thursday we did some shape discrimination, looking for matching 3D shapes from a basket to match the ones the teacher had. Once we’d found all of the matches, children took turns playing “Make it the same”, a builder/copier game, where the teacher built a model using shapes and asked the children to try to copy it. As we played we built spatial reasoning skills, and thought carefully about whether the copied model was exactly the same or not. Then, we thought about how colours are similar and different and played a colour sorting game, using primary colours as our focus colours. Our nursery rhyme of the day was “B-I-N-G-O”.

On Friday we talked about how our families are all different and looked at family photos of different children in class allowing space and time for communication and language skills practise. In the afternoon, we thought about our sound of the week “n”, thinking about how “name” starts with “n”. We counted how many letters were in each of our names, helping build our name recognition skills and counting! Our nursery rhyme of the day was “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.

Throughout the week, children have explored indoors and outdoors, through construction and roleplay, painting and mark-making, physical challenges, and a variety of sensory experiences. Next week our sound of the week will be “m” and we will be thinking about what makes us feel proud. If you have not already, please use ClassDojo to send in some proud moments you have had with your child which we can use to facilitate our discussion.