Thunks

Odd Questions to Make the Kids Think

Developing speech and language skills are an essential part of the Early Years. Language development leads to developing story ideas, critical thinking, social skills and many more!

Thunk work towards raising children’s confidence to speak in front of groups, in full sentences and to think about topics they haven’t previously considered.

I’ve often asked the kids what colour is Tuesday, which they sometimes take literally and say the colour of the word on the board.. Other Thunks could be:

• Can you touch the wind?
• If you took the stripes off a zebra, what colour would it be? (Also tiger and spots from a leopard)
• Where do words go after you’ve heard them?

Worksheets vs. Writing Frames

Why We Don’t Use Worksheets in the Early Years

Worksheets have no place in the Early Years! For a start, the children can’t read to answer the questions on the sheets!

I do cringe when I see worksheets used in focus groups or as the main part of the lesson. Every child is writing the same answer, it’s very prescribed and formal.

The Early Years curriculum is designed to be creative, free and individual. There is room for every little person to express themselves and explore their own interests.

Saying all that, I have used worksheets, everyone does. I tend to use them as independent activities that the children can access at their own level. I also use guided work when doing handwriting or letter formation. Worksheets have their place but if you can use an alternative, that’s by far the better option.

Assessment in the Early Years

The 2012-13 Curriculum

Showing progress in the Early Years has always been difficult. The previous system of using profile points allowed practitioners to show numerical progress for all children from Nursery to end of Reception.

Many children would start in Reception at level 2 or 3, and would progress through the levels until they finished Reception.

Unfortunately, there is no current numerical method for showing progress nationally.

For our own records, in our Reception class we are trying to make sure we keep meticulous records of phonics, literacy and mathematics. I thought I would share some of my assessment sheets to help out other practitioners.

	Writing Assessment Record Sheet We have split up the basic statements for the writing targets from 30-50 months all the way to a 2c on curriculum targets. We looked at the main process the children go through to be able to write independently and put it into a table that we can use to help us guide our planning and to track pupil progress.
	Phonics Assessment Record Sheet This sheet is one in which you can input the children’s total scores for the term. So, if they know 12/20 phase 2 phonemes and so on, and tracks the progress they have made from the previous term. Obviously leave the progress columns empty if those areas haven’t been tested yet.
	Reading Assessment Record As the children begin to use their phonemes to decode words for reading and also begin to recognise more words, this assessment sheet allows the user to track progress through terms and also see where the children are currently.
	Number Writing and Reading Assessment Record I do like to keep specific records to help with my planning. I find it’s easy to waste time teaching children things they already know. This sheet allows me to target specific children with specific number recognition which I can jot down in my planning. It doesn’t actually take that long, either.
	Catch as You Can Observation Sheets These sheets could be completed by your Learning Through Play Manager, as they are working with children. However, we don’t want to be filling in sheets when we should be moving children’s learning on so I recommend targetting specific children, perhaps children who need more help or children who are gifted and talented to use these sheets as effectively as possible.
	Magic Moments We keep Learning Journey scrap books at our setting, where maths, literacy and topic work, photographs and magic moments are collected and displayed to show children’s progress through the year. The magic moments cards capture special moments the children share with you. For example, today I was invited to a space party so I asked the child what happened at a space party and wrote down what he said on the magic moment card. This will later be stuck into his Learning Journey The magic moments cards are fantastic ways of capturing sweet things the children say and making notes about their progress through snapshots.

If you have any ideas on assessment in the Early Years, please share!

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Spellings

Yes, We Do Them In Reception!

Not all schools have a cohort that are ready for spellings in Reception. Some children are just not at the stage where they can sit and do sustained work. This could be due to life style, home background or personal development.

We do assess the children individually before giving out spellings, which is important. While you want to give the children all the same opportunities, pushing children who are not ready for writing will only be detrimental to their learning attitude.

When the children have reached a good level of fine motor skills and have learnt many of their phase 2 phonemes, we will start giving spellings to take home.

We use the Letters and Sounds High Frequency Words, and base our high frequency words on those. The spellings follow the order of the words as they appear in letters and sounds, making use of the phonemes children have learnt. There are only 3 or 4 words per week as we don’t want to overload the children. Those adults learning languages will know how difficult it is to learn a lot of new words in one go, so we drip feed the words to the children throughout the year.

We have been printing these sheets out A5 size, double sided so that the writing page is on the back, parents literally have to look, cover, write, check to complete the spellings. The document you can download has the pages all set up to be printed double sided. We assess the children’s reading and writing skills for their spellings in summative phonics assessment.

If you would like to download the spellings document, please click on the links.

	Spelling pages 1
	Spelling pages 2
	Spelling pages 3
	Spelling pages 4
	Spelling pages 5 - 10
	Spelling pages 11 – end

We have noticed a distinct difference between the children who complete their spellings and those who don’t. Homework, in Reception, is encouraged but is not compulsory. We noticed an increased improvement in both the reading and writing skills of the children doing their spellings.

There is a lot of controversy in the Early Years community about children learning through rote.

It’s All Gone a Bit Gruffalo

I am Gruffalo Mad!

I’ve been a huge fan of the Gruffalo from the first time I read the story. It’s different and unique and sparks the children’s imagination. There are thousands of lesson plans you can use from the Gruffalo, and I’ve gone a little bit Gruffalo Mad!

My husband will say I don’t need an excuse to spend money, but with a Gruffalo lesson week coming up, I couldn’t resist!

I am teaching a rhyming lesson, but I didn’t want the children to only be involved in rhyming, I wanted them to have a rounded experience of the Gruffalo so the resources I have are:

• Gruffalo role play
• Gruffalo story sequencing
• Gruffalo large pairs matching
• Gruffalo small pairs matching
• Matching the written description to the picture (that’s to challenge my highers)
• Matching rhyming pairs, so ‘snake’ would be paired with ‘lake’ for example
• Making a Gruffalo’s child puppet
• Writing the roasted fox, owl icecream, scrambled snake and Gruffalo crumble recipes
• A maze (for fine motor skills)
• Story writing frames if the children would like to write their own Gruffalo story
• And a Gruffalo puppet
  
  
• I also have in my classroom a matching rhymes game that isn’t Gruffalo related