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EY1 Matters
EY1 children have been counting and recognising numbers 1-5. The children were firstly engaged in 'popping' numbers. They could show number awareness by sorting out written numbers and drawn circles to represent the numbers. Children were then asked to count out pom-poms to match numbers. To further expand the children's understanding of number knowledge, children also had the opportunity to do their mark-making to represent numbers.
EY2 Matters
The children have shown good letter formation when writing the first letter of their name and when they label their work. As an extension at story time, Ms Chrystelle added phase 2 phonics sounds /m/ /a/ /s/ /d/ and asked the children to use their listening ears to match the sound to the word.
Distinguishing sounds in the environment and spoken words is a crucial step toward phonemic awareness. To further challenge their listening and attention to the process of learning, the children have begun writing their full names without assistance from the teachers.
We encourage the children to hold their pens firmly and use language from Read, Write, Inc to form each letter. The children can now notice an improvement in their writing over a week and recognise past, future and present tenses when discussing their mark-making each day.
EY3 Matters
We wanted to explore ways to combine separate areas of student pursuit and thought children's interest in games could be a great channel. Children have already built up a lot of experience playing board games. They are very proficient at rolling two dice, counting the sum of those two numbers, and then moving their character a corresponding number of spaces accordingly. Many children even started to design their board games on paper.
Nevertheless, we wanted to show children that there are many more games and explored children's interests in clay, drawing, hot glue gun creations, and use their prior knowledge and interests through a role-playing game. Children helped draw a grid on a large table in our classroom to become the playing space for the game. We guided children to make a physical player piece to move around the play grid and use clay and the hot glue gun to make extended player accessories such as flying vehicles, buildings, and tools. They drew and wrote their character's information on their 'player page' and chose character attributes about special abilities, strengths, elements, and background story. Children could travel around with their friends or go on solo quests, and as they explore the world, a variety of exciting surprises and events would happen, with children co-narrating the story. However, what happens ultimately is decided by the roll of the dice. Using special 20-sided dice and math skills, children would need to roll larger or smaller numbers according to specific situations, such as looking for treasure, escaping from an erupting volcano, or fighting pirates. Children were highly engaged in this role-playing game, all in English, and readily used new English communication and language skills.
EY4 Matters
In the math section, we reviewed the concept of odd and even numbers. Children can draw any number from a box to see if it is odd or even, then record it. In addition to this, we explored the concept of units of measurement and estimated the length of different things. The children understood that when a number is followed by various units of length (meters, decimetres, centimetres), it represents different lengths. So the children formed groups to find 1 metre, 1 decimetre, 1 centimetre of things in class. Everyone used various methods: some were measuring with a ruler, some just took a guess, and one child accidentally found that the width of their little thumb was 1 centimetre.
