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LITERACY
Books play a huge part in the day at the World Outside Kindergarten. They are used for inspiration for games, activities and role play. The hunt for the Gruffalo could take all day, once you have made Owl ice cream in the mud kitchen and then cooked some cookies to take for a walk into the deep, dark wood!
The Early years goals are:
Comprehension
Word Reading
Writing
Through listening to stories and then retelling them , for example, 'The Three Little Pigs', the children can listen to the story and then make the houses of straw, bricks and sticks.
They not only learn vocabulary through repeated sentences, but they learn about forces such as the wind and the strength of materials.
They also learn about the use of phonics , such as this worm is 'slippery' and shaped like the letter 'S', or the branch has grown in to the shape of the letter 'P' - looking for shapes and patterns in nature that resemble letters and numbers.
By using non fiction books, with the help of adults the children will be able to look for facts on the the creatures and plants they find, for example, checking if a mini beast is an insect or an amphibian.
They can record their findings on simple charts and compare it with their findings in previous months when the weather was different, for example, the colour of leaves in the spring and the colour of leaves in the autumn.
The children will get chance to record the findings themselves, whilst using pencils and crayons to write.
They will see letters and numbers around the site that they will become familiar with, for example, associating a tree with the letter 'T' and bug area with the letter 'B'.
They will find their names out of the basket to sign themselves in each morning and, at the end of the day, put their name back.
At the World Outside Kindergarten we love books, especially those that connect us with nature and the world around us.
We develop fantastic activities based around books, such as 'Dinosaurs Love Underpants'. We hunt for pants hidden in the woods, we sit quietly and listen to the story and then create dinosaurs out of clay and cut pants out of leaves.
At Christmas we read 'The Stick Man' and hunt for people shaped sticks and dress them up with wool and leaves. We then sit around the fire with hot chocolate listening to the story again with our stick family sat next to us on the benches.
We head off on bear hunts around the woodland, stepping over logs and jumping in puddles, before finding the bear under a bush and running all the way home!
