Supporting your child at home
We provide a weekly snapshot of things you can do at home to help support the learning your child has accessed throughout the week. This will also give you an understanding of the things we might be talking to your children about or exploring within the provision and to give you ideas that you can take away if you want to do things with your child at home. There is absolutely no pressure at all to do this and as we always recommend playing with and reading to your child is the best thing you can do!
Please remember that we do not encourage the use of workbooks that force children to sit down at a table for long periods of time; this does not help them to learn. Instead, please ensure your child has endless opportunities to play and be curious, a chance to talk and problem solve and most importantly, be read to.
Communication and Language is at the heart of everything we do and we actively encourage talk and communication with your child whilst they are playing; this is the best way for them to develop their communication and language skills. Also, at home, we encourage you to speak your home language!
Reading books to your child can really help them with developing a love of books and also help them build their language skills. We created some videos to support you with communication through the reading of books so you have some guidance in how to use language and questioning to help develop how your child communicates about books and reading. We hope that you find them helpful; after a while it will just become second nature.
We really encourage you to upload what you've done at home onto the Evidence Me app! Speak to the front office if you don't know what to do.
Click the links to access the reading videos:
Communicating Through Reading Challenge Day 1
Communicating Through Reading Challenge Day 2
Communicating Through Reading Challenge Day 3
Communicating Through Reading Challenge Day 4
Communicating Through Reading Challenge Day 5
Click the red link to access a helpful document to support reading at home! Education Endowment Foundation's 7 Top Tips to Support Reading at Home
We have also been working with The Tapscott Learning Trust on producing videos to help support your child's development. We hope that you find them useful. Click the link to go directly to the Supporting Home Learning EYFS Playlist on Youtube:
The Tapscott Learning Trust EYFS Playlist
Phonics
A few parents asked about phonics development for their children. We don't recommend for children to be pushed into phonics and instead should commence phonics when they are ready. It is more important that children can distinguish between the sounds they hear in the environment (like a plane in the sky, a police car's siren, birds cheeping etc) before asking them to identify specific sounds in words. However, here are some online resources to help you out with the sounds.
Yasmin has put together an introductory video to help support you with what we do your children at nursery when they are ready for phonics. Two year old children should not be doing phonics, although Rohan has put together a video to guide you through Environmental Sounds which is much more appropriate for younger children.
Book of the Month
This month's Book of the Month is Look Up. Please click on the link for the information sheet for this book: Information Sheet
