‘Happy’ and ‘Sad’ Aren’t the Only Words!
My favourite way of teaching adjectives to Reception aged children is through the game, Guess Who. But you can also make your own guess who game using pictures from the internet.
I use a home made guess who game when talking about bugs. There are bugs with stripes, six legs, eight legs, wings, no legs, thin bodies, fat bodies, there are many ways to describe and identify different bugs.
This would also work well with aliens.
Test Them Test Them Test Them!!!
As we all know, there’s pressure to show progress in the Early Years. It can be difficult to show progress, you can’t really take a photo of a child not sharing and then a photo of children sharing but you can show development in writing skills.
Drawing skills also develop during Reception so it’s a good idea to assess these at the same time as writing skills.
I’ve made this writing sheet with the Early Learning Goals at the bottom so that any moderators or inspectors can see the targets your children are aiming towards.
You could print this out as a A5 sheet or an A4 sheet, depending on the time of year and the attainment level of your cohort.
A Simple Writing Frame
I’m just updating some artwork and display in my room. I’ve made the background for my writing, and I’m going to use the writing frame below for the children to write on.
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There is differentiation in the size of the writing frames and through using lines or no lines. In my experience, children tend to write less when there are no lines on the paper so it might be good to target the ‘no lines’ paper at lower attainers.
Your Most Sensible Guess
In the Early Years Development Matters, estimating comes under Mathematics, Number 40 – 60 months, with the target: Estimates how many objects they can see and checks by counting them.
It would be easy to whack out a worksheet to tick this target off, but it’s important to avoid worksheets at all costs in the Early Years.
To that end, I have created estimating question cards!
