🎃 Happy Halloween 🎃

Yay, it’s almost half term and we’ve survived the first few weeks of settling in and the general madness of being back at school!

This year I did a Halloween theme for the first time ever. In the past I’ve always been afraid of upsetting certain parents, but seeing how into witches and potion making some of my Muslim girls were last year, I decided to go for it!

We focused on the Julia Donaldson book, room on the broom, which is full of rhythm, rhyme and repitition and is perfect for phase 1 phonics.

I am a firm believer in not introducing phase 2 letter sounds too early in reception. I feel that it is imperative that children are exposed to plenty of phase 1 rhythm, rhyme, alliteration and blending and segmenting games, in order to build up a solid base and an ear for sounds. In our objective led planning this week our literacy focus has been blending and segmenting sounds in words. We set up a silly soup activity outside with lentils, beans and CVC word objects….

Later in the week we transformed our outdoor playhouse into a witches hut….

In it we had our silly soup cauldron and some CVC word objects. In the other corner we set out the props from the room and the broom story as well as having the book and picture prompts on the wall. We also filled our little ikea storage wall hanger full of pens and writing frames..

Our numeracy objective this week was for the children to count out a set amount from a larger group. I modelled this activity at the carpet and then set it up in our water tray which was filled with gelibaff and cauldrons. The children had to pick a number card and place that many items into their cauldron. They LOVED the gelibaff and asked if they could have it out everyday!

On on our funky fingers table I vagazzled some skull shot glasses that I bought in good old poundland and the children had to fill them up accordingly with spiders of varying sizes. Again differentiated tools were provided.

The following week I set this funky fingers activity up in a tuff spot outside with green gelibaff. The children were thrilled!

Gelibaff funky fingers

That’s all for now folks. I hope you all have a wonderful and restful half term. ❤️

Nifty Numicon

I ❤️ Numicon. The tactile and visual element it adds to number is fantastic.

At the moment in Reception we are really just at the exploration stage, so I’ve but putting the numicon out with the paints, in gloop and with the play dough.

At the play dough table the children made imprints with various pieces and investigated which pieces would fit on top of the other. Marbles and gems also fit nicely into the Numicon holes so I put out a few bowls of these and modelled lots of counting out and one to one correspondence.

We also put it out with some aqua beads which offered a fantastic sensory experience….

We’ve been using the numicon tiles as a scaffold for our children who don’t get the concept of counting out from a larger group and stopping at a said number. With the Aqua beads we encouraged the children to pick a number card and then count out that many aqua beads into the Numicon holes.

I also have a little numicon display up on the wall and know it’s a bit OCD, but I’ve colour coordinated all my number lines etc around the classroom to coincide with the Numicon colours so that the children might notice certain patterns developing.

I had a few (million) requests to add the colour coded numicon number lines pictured on the wall display above and on my on maths table below. Your wish is my command; please click on the images below for your free downloads!

Click on the image below, or failing that the link below the image, to access your free PDF copy of the numicon colour coded numberline…

Free Download – numicon number line

Numicon colour coded number line to 20

Numicon colour coded number cards

🍂 Autumnal funky fingers 🍂

Thank you so much for all the love and support I received for my first ever blog post. You’ve given me the encouragement I need to keep going. Below are this weeks autumn themed funky fingers challenges…

I magpied this idea from Pinterest and thought it was perfect for my funky fingers table..

Leaf hole punching & threading on rockmyclassroom.com

Again, I put out a variety of hole punching tools. I got my star hole punches from my fav early years resources high street shop, tiger!

Conker sorting with tea strainers

I picked up up the tea strainers in tiger at the weekend for only £1 each. They are quite challenging to open and close and are a perfect finger strengthening tool. 👍 I added the measuring cylinders as an extra provocation – how many conkers does it take to fill each one?

This was such a popular activity, particularly amongst the boys. You can see that some children needed to use 2 hands to open the strainer, particularly those children who have a weak pencil grip.

Outdoors we tried to make the best of the bad weather by adding powder paint to the huge puddles! The children squealed with delight, jumping up and down and using the rollers and paint brushes to mix the paint.

The children loved walking around in their wellies creating footprints….

That’s all for now, but did you know that you can also follow me on….

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Thanks for reading ✨

First week of funky fingers 👍

Hello everyone and welcome to my new blog, Rock My Classroom! I know it looks a bit bare, but I’m not the most technically apt, so please bear with me while I find my way!

I decided to set up a blog because I am constantly inspired by images I see shared online by other early years bloggers and thought I might give it a whirl myself.

One thing I was keen to set up in my Reception class this year was a funky fingers table, so to start off I’m going to share this element of my provision with you all. Future topics will include using an online assessment app and developing my outdoor area. Ok here goes…

Day 1 & 2 some marble sorting on an upturned ikea bath mat

Days 3, 4 & 5 – Pom Pom sorting with differentiated tools – tweezers, tongs and starter chopsticks. I daren’t remove this after 2 days. The children loved it and turned it into an ice cream parlour!

Gloop and powder paint exploration. Of course they were more into the colour mixing and investigating the texture than writing their names in it!

Powder paint and shaving foam. I needed to add a drop of water to this because it was quite dry to begin with. It made the most wonderful mousse like texture. Even with aprons the kids were filthy 😄

That’s all for now folks. Until next time ✨

Rock My Classroom

Irresistible early Years ideas for your indoor and outdoor provision….

Images

🎃 Happy Halloween 🎃

Nifty Numicon

🍂 Autumnal funky fingers 🍂

First week of funky fingers 👍