Newsletter Term 5 April 2024

Lovely to see you all back and a warm welcome to our new families. We hope you enjoyed the 2 week break.

This term is 6 weeks and the last day is Friday 24th May. Don’t forget you can find term dates and newsletters on our website along with our Ethos for you to read.

Continuing with our All About Me theme we will move on to Emotions and Feelings. This is such an important area of learning in Early Years and something that we work very hard at embedding throughout your childs learning journey with us. We will use the Colour Monster resources and lots of makaton to support this topic.

Ideas for home to help reinforce your childs learning- while covering the 7 areas of learning.

Literacy-Have a look at the Colour Monster if you arent familiar with it. another book is the Pout Pout fish. You could send kindness cards to family and friends. Use colour monster corresponding colours for writing such as yellow for happy and blue for sad etc

Maths- create emotive faces with blocks, emotion puzzles,

Personal, social and emotional- make faces in a mirror together. Hide behind a card and guess what face youre making. Use puppets to talk about how they are feeling. Games such as ‘monster says…. Be happy etc’

Communication and language- talk every day about how you are feeling and why. Model emotions such as im feeling angry today and it helps me if I stomp a little- its ok to be angry but not to…eg hit. Use new words such as calm, frustrated, joy.

Physical- move in different ways to express fellings, skipping-happy, crawlig-afraid etc. create colour monster pictures for fine motor skills. Do some yoga- it makes you feel calm and there are lots of 5 min childrens yoga on you tube in many formats- superhero/emotions/animals etc.

Understanding the world- build a photo book of family and friends faces showing differnet emotions. Talk about the impact it has on others.

Expressive art and design- make up plays and stories with small world figures about their activities and feelings. Create faces in sand/playdough.

Also look at makaton signs for each emotion- happy, sad, calm, afraid, angry and love. Again easy to find on you tube.

Lastly, we want to create more photo books of the children for them to look at in the setting. If you have any fun days out and would like to share them with us via email, we can print them to share with their friends. All online photos are then deleted and nothing is shared out side the setting. Thank you