Castle Room News

Over the next two weeks we will be focusing on the key area of Understanding the World as we develop our technological knowledge and introduce coding. The keywords we will be focusing on will be: this represents that, coding/programming.

On the Creative Table over the last few months, we have created a variety of wonderful puppets. We will use these, and newly made puppets to create stories through stop-motion. We will use a special stop-motion app to take step-by-step photos and then mix them together to tell our stories. Once the children have created their video, we will then create a voice-over to tell the story.

We have added a special Fred the Frog Station, where we will be using our Phonics friend Fred to talk about what he is doing. The children have the prompt to 'show me what Fred is doing' by taking a picture, then we will print the photos and use our special Talk to Speak photo frame to put the photo in and create an audio recording to answer the prompt 'tell me what Fred is doing'.

Outside, over the next 2 weeks we will be continuing on with the ‘World Cup’ theme and working on our football skills. We will practice dribbling, passing and shooting whilst eventually working towards an end game.

In the Mud kitchen we will be adding some step-by-step recipe cards in order for the children to follow. This sort of activity helps to develop the early skills of technology; sequencing, direction and debugging.
We will also be exploring cause and effect with shadow drawings on large paper, exploring how blocking the light source changes the outcome.
Towards the end of the week we will introduce our remote control cars. We will spend a few days getting used to the controls before challenging the children to follow certain pathways.

Lastly, we have been extremely lucky to have some new Bongo Drums added to our outdoor area. We will explore the different sounds we can make with our hands and how this works with the other musical instruments we already have out there.

Our first Book of the Week is The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We will follow the life cycle of the butterfly as we introduce the scientific concept of Metamorphosis; alongside this we have brought caterpillars into the classroom to observe the life cycle in real time. Here is the Makaton story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQNxBrONqaA