Hi everyone,
'Home' by Alex T. Smith is a lovely story about family and friendship. Four friends who live together, end up falling out because they want to do different things. Eventually, they realise that it's not about where you live but who you live with, that makes a home. This is a nice book about love, family, friendship, compromise and invention.
Learning Ideas
Communication and Language
Re-tell the story from the beginning using just the pictures.
When the friends got angry with each other, what should that have said instead of arguing?
Place a group of 5-10 toy animals on a tray and cover it with a cloth. Secretly take one away and uncover the tray. Can the children say which animal is missing? Try with more animals or taking away two animals at a time.
Physical Development
Fine Motor - Practise building a tall tower or a house using blocks. Can you make them balance?
Build a house where all the friends would want to live? What if you were building a house for your friends? How would it be different?
Practising using an effective pencil grip while writing and drawing.
Explore the craft ideas later on using tools.
Personal Social Emotional Development
The friends in the story ended up arguing and fighting. If you get cross with your friends what can you do or say to help you calm down?
Build word power by encouraging children to use words other than happy/sad. e.g worried, upset, downhearted, miserable, dejected, cross, ecstatic, cheerful, merry, jolly, delighted, etc.
Who are your best friends?
Play a board game together and practise taking turns. Pop-up-pirate, Crocodile Dentist and Monkeying Around (Monkey Business) are some of my classes favourites.
Reading
Retell the story from the beginning.
What is your favourite part of the story? Why?
How is this story similar to other ones that you have read before?
If you were to write your own story, who would be in your house?
Writing
Draw a picture of your best friend. Can you write their name using phonetic knowledge? Remember in Nursery we aren't looking for spelling to be correct, mark-making is fine. If we are working with a Reception child then we would be hoping for a phonically plausible attempt to name the bear e.g. "b-air".
Numbers
The animals in the story were called one, two, three and four. Do you think this might get confusing when they are counting? Practice counting up to 4/5 out loud. Can you now count four objects using your number knowledge?
Use the Number Land Lessons to help you learn/recap the numbers.
Shape Space and Measures
Can you build a tall or short tower using your bricks or lego? Which is tall/short/taller/shorter/tallest/shortest?
The animals used wheels in the shape of circles to make their house move. What other shapes could they have made their wheels from? Square? Rectangle? Triangle? Do you think that these shapes would work as wheels?
Look a the picture of the house? Can you see any shapes? What shapes do you need to make a house?
Understanding of the World
The animals all like to do different things. What do you know about bears, badgers, deers and rabbits?
In the end, the animals modified their house so that they could go to different places together. They added wheels and by the looks of it an engine. Can you invent something new using junk modelling materials?
Could you add wheels to something you use? How does that change its function? (A phone with wheels, a TV remote with wheels, a teddy with wheels, a chair with wheels). What might be the problem with some of these inventions? Maybe the TV remote might get lost more often if it had wheels and kept rolling away.
Expressive Arts and Design
This week we made some friends to go in our cardboard box homes.
We used toilet rolls for the body, circular paper for a face and then used scissors to snip a hole in each side of the body so that we could thread a pipe cleaner through to make some arms.
Draw a picture of your best friend or family. Can you write their name? Think carefully about what we have on our faces. (Nose, eyes, mouth, ears, hair, etc.)
Have a lovely week,
Big Fox
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