Week 2 - 30th March 2020
Weekly inspiration for you at home
UPDATE
Find our most recent newsletter on the blog!
Key Challenge: 'Why I'm Brilliant'
Each half term we ask the children why they are clever, strong, kind and all-round brilliant because their voices are really important in how we reflect on their learning and progress.
We’d like you to try this at home this week for their Spring reports. For children starting school next academic year, we will share reports with primary schools later in April.
1. Your child can draw a picture of themselves looking fabulous.
You can use a photo of your child if they don’t want to draw or they could draw their favourite things to do at Montessori and home if they would rather.
2. Sit down and have a chat about what they are really good at learning, what they love at Montessori and home, what makes them proud of themselves and what they think they are getting better at. Use their own words to annotate their drawing.
3. Send a picture of the finished masterpiece to Lucie or upload it onto Tapestry. We’ll add it to the Spring report and share it with your child’s primary school when and where relevant.
Understanding The World
- Watch the opening of ‘The Lion King’ (the live action version - it’s also on Now TV and the new Disney App if you have them) (upto 0.52)
- What animals can you spot? How many can you spot? Can you find where these animals live?
- Use our ‘African animals’ sheets to research some of your favourite animals in the clip – you can use books or the internet with a grown up and colour in your animals.
- What do they eat? How big are they? What sort of habitat do they have?
- Trace round the shadow of your favourite toys in the garden. Go back later and see what’s happened to the shadows. Why is this? (Thanks Dolcie and your mummy for the inspiration on this one)
Mathematics
- Play a memory game by putting a range of different shape and size objects under a tea towel. Remove one and see if the other person can spot what is missing. Give them clues about the shape and size if they are finding it tricky e.g. “It’s smooth” “It’s smaller than the ball” “It’s got pointy edges”
- Make a witches’ soup by counting your ingredients on this recipe card. Can you make your own recipe card for other potions by counting or measuring your ingredients?
Being Imaginative
- Make your own snap cards by making two of each picture or colouring in printed ones. It could be animals, fruit and veg or even word cards. Then play Snap with them!
Literacy
- Use what you have at home to make props for your favourite story. A blue towel could be the water in ‘The Snail and the Whale’. A red cube could be ‘Robot the No-Bot’
- You can act out the story with the book and your props!
- Make a book about an exciting day you have had or make up an adventure! You can draw the pictures and get someone to help to write the words down. You can staple it together when you’re finished.
- Make a salt/flour/sand tray to practice letter formation. Use these guides with the arrows to really focus on encouraging accurate direction as this will lay the foundations for cursive writing later.
Physical Development & Self-Care
- Time yourself brushing your teeth. Did you manage it for two minutes?
- Make an obstacle course with what you can find. See if you can build one that makes you jump, balance, crawl or even climb!
Online and on TV
Teach Your Monster to Read
Montessorium: Intro to Letters
Audible
Zoo Webcams
Bear Grylls and The Scouts
- Teach Your Monster to Read is a free phonics and reading game online, which covers the first two years of learning to read, from matching letters and sounds to enjoying small books. There is also an available app to download from your App Store.
- Montessorium cleverly replicates our sandpaper letters and has both letter recognition and also digraph and capitals for children at different letters. The ‘sandpaper sound’ is somewhat unpleasant but that might just be me!
- Audible have released a range of children’s audiobooks for free.
- Zoos like Edinburgh Zoo have got live webcams to see what the animals are up to.
- Sometimes a photo is all you need for a little inspiration so follow us on Pinterest for more ideas.
- Bear Grylls has worked with Scouts to put together a list of over 100 indoor activity ideas to keep children learning new skills. Some are too old for our children but great to help older siblings with…or even a keen ‘Bear Grylls wannabe’ Dad maybe!
A quick note to say...
We know you’re sharing all your own amazing ideas with each other and staying in touch which is fantastic. We have loved seeing so many of you on Tapestry this week – keep them coming!
