Our Pre-School children are soon off on a new adventure, starting school! Whilst we will be super sad to see them go, we are also very excited for them as they begin their transition to school. Our aim for any children who are going off to school is to help them become; confident, happy and independent little MonkeyMooers. With this in mind, we have created a school readiness programme which does exactly what is says on the tin: Gets our little MonkeyMooers ready for school.

This week has all been about recognising our names. When at school, there may be a self registration where the children will need to find their names. Or they may need to find their seats- which have their names placed in the right space. Or they may not recognise their lunch box or bags, which may have their names on to identify. With this in mind, we have been focusing on name recognition.

This week we have been working on recognising and writing our names! The practitioner wrote each child’s name and supported the children to identify their own name first. Once identified, the children were encouraged to look at the letters individually. They then picked up a pen and independently wrote each letter from their name. We have also been on a name hunt around the nursery! We were very proud when we found our names!!

We had lots of fun recognising familiar names and writing them down. The children started this week by listening to our phonics songs for the letters we have in our name, we then went on to recognising the different letters that our in our name. The children finally worked very hard to write their names as well as their friends names.

To help the children to recognize their names we have been doing some name activities.
We have been recognizing our names both indoors and outdoors.
Out on the field we enjoyed writing our names in the mud using sticks. Our grown ups wrote their names and then the children copied.
At the writing table the children have been using stencils to write their names. A grown up showed them the letters that they needed and the children did well to trace around them.
In the garden the children were given their name labels and asked to find their names. Once that had found there names they then wrote them on paper.
Also in the garden we played a name recognition game. We had lots of different names in a tray and the children had to find their names and pick them out.