Toys old and new

Looking at toys old and new was the focus of our work this week. We started the week with Dogger by Shirley Hughes, a firm favourite of many children. We heard the story, and wrote a description of Dogger, the lost toy dog.

Wednesday saw the arrival of parents and grandparents toys and there were some great finds once again. Thank you so much. Careful handling and ‘good looking’ meant that hopefully all will be returned intact next week. The non-fiction writing was certainly inspired by the items.  The children also watched the BBC program ‘Magic Grandad’ who went back in time and introduced toys from the past.

 In art the toys were drawn and the children looked at evidence of old toys in some famous paintings.

In our computing work we looked at different toys and learnt how they worked. The remote control cars were out, racing down an obstacle course in the hall.

 On Wednesday the lady from Stevenage Museum came in to see us as the museum is closed due to flood damage. After introducing herself and showing them photographs of the children to whom the old toys had belonged, she divided the children into four groups and they looked at and played with old and new toys. They experimented to see how they worked and how they compared to their modern equivalents. They were encouraged to use lots of language about materials and looked for evidence to suggest whether a toy was old or modern. Some of the discussions highlighted the need to do a lot more work on materials.

In maths the children practised finding the correct coins to pay for toys. Why don’t you make a toy shop at home and practise selling and buying toys to provide experience of using real coins to pay for items.

Another aspect covered in maths this week was sorting, The children did some sorting with the toys, however, finding the language to describe how they had sorted seemed in many cases as problematical as moving away from sorting by colour and shape which is the nursery level. We were trying to encourage the children to look at different aspects, such as what the toys were made of, sorting by the number of legs the toy had, whether it was an old toy or a new toy, by the thickness of the Lego, or the number of knobs on it etc.

If you have older children in the school you will have received a letter about World Book day (Thursday 3rd March). This letter invites the children to dress up as a character from Harry Potter. These are not stories that children of reception age are familiar with as the content is for an older audience. If your child wants to dress up, they can dress as a witch or a wizard, as the reception class will be looking at magic spells on that day.

There is no Show and Tell next week.

Next week we will be learning about Chinese New Year and Shrove Tuesday (Pancake day) and of course there are parent consultations on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. Come ten minutes or so before your time to have a look at your child’s books. Please remember that these meetings can only be ten minutes and hopefully a timer will keep me on track! If more discussion is required another appointment will need to be booked.