Next week we will be exploring the Book “A Squash and a Squeeze” which is written by one of our favourite authors Julia Donaldson. A little known fact is that this story is actually based on an old Polish/Jewish folktale! If you do not have the book at home there are lots of renditions of the story on YouTube that you could watch together with your child at home.
As with all of the books we are going to focus on this half term this book gives lots of opportunities for children to listen out for rhyming words on every page. At Pals we spend a lot of time encouraging the children to hear, find and make up their own rhyming words as it is such an important tool in learning to decipher the written code, If you can hear the patterns in words it helps you later on to find those matching patterns on a page.
We will basing some of our activities around this book next week including:
1. Making houses out of different size boxes to see how many of our small world animals will fit in each one.
2. Make houses using a variety of construction bricks
3. Using some of our small world houses and animals to re-tell the story ourselves.
4. Making up our own words to rhyme with some of the couplets in the book
5. Painting or drawing pictures to create our own illustrations of the story
6. Talking about shape, space and measure as we look at the shape and size of the house
7. Talk about quantity as we count the number of animals (or living creatures) in the house including the old lady and the wise old man.
8. Explore mathematical language such as full and empty as we put animals in and out of our various house creations.
9. Talk about weight as we lift up our houses with or without animals in
10. Talk about the different animals and point out their unique features
11. Explore language that may be new to the children such as “larder”, “implore”, “tap out a jig” and “weeny”. |