The third topic of the first term is Christmas  

     It seems that we have only just started this scholastic year, yet in a few weeks time, it will be Christmas.  Therefore, this theme was an obvious choice for the last topic of the first term of school. We shall actually be merging the colour topic and this together and continue mixing colours make more Christmas decorations.

    Children love Christmas and they are already very excited that it is getting near.  Planning activities around the theme of Christmas makes it all the more fun for the children.  It gives them the opportunity to enjoy all the preparations and activities even more.

     We started this topic by talking about  the four seasons.  Very soon it will be winter.   Winter is the coldest season.  We wear warm clothes in winter and when it's raining we use an umbrella and wear a raincoat and boots.  In winter we celebrate Christmas  because  it  is the birthday of Jesus Christ. The children enjoyed listening to the story of Jesus and how he was born in Bethlehem.  

   We mixed more yellow and blue and painted a big and a small Christmas tree.

      This week I introduced the letter and sound 'p' (presepju). The children looked for the letter 'p' in our story books.  They realised that they could also find it in the middle or at the end of a word.  This helped them become aware of individual sounds in a spoken word, which is the most difficult level of phonological awareness.  Phonological awareness helps children become prepared to learn how letters and sounds go together into words.  This makes it much easier for someone to learn to read and write.  

  We painted the shoe- boxes we brought to school and next week we shall be making some alterations to them and turning them into cribs.

We painted toilet rolls to make a tree for our crib.

Our pre-writing handouts had a Christmas theme too.

      These are some of are maths activities this week, mainly recognition and value of numbers 1-10. We used coins so that the children could see the numbers on the coins and understand their different values.  The concentrated mainly on number 3, value recognition and shape.