Little Learning Leaders

That 5mins when they all looked and smiled! 🎄 😁

My new best bud! Meet Ghillie 👋
We’ve had her over a month now and what a crazy, exciting, exhausting, lovely thing it is to own a puppy. She’s 14weeks old and has brought so much joy to our family. The Littles are learning how to care for another living thing and respect her choices and needs. It’s a steep learning curve and we’re loving it. 🐶 💚

Betwixtmas necessitates getting out in the fresh air with family and trying to remember what day it is!
Are you ready to head back out into the world now? ..or still happily in your PJs?! 💚

Happy Christmas from our family to you and yours. 💚

I received these amazing play dough cutters from to try out with my Littles and in the classroom.
They are fantastic for learning about shape through play and it gave a great opportunity to teach mathematical language as we cut out different shapes (eg vertices). My children used them in different ways.
3yr old - cut out different shapes, pretended they were biscuits and learned the names of some of them.
6yr old - added numbers to show how many sides each shape had.
8yr old - cut out all the different shapes and sorted them in as many different ways as possible. Image shows her first way of sorting (straight edges and curved edges with the heart in the middle because it has both).
Looking at Etsy shop I can already see so many other items that would be great in any classroom and ideal for extending learning. I highly recommend you take a look! 💚

Posey Poppy!
A ‘just because’ post. This little lady was so proud of her outfit on holiday. She chose this 1950s vintage dress (from ) for the bargain price of £7 and she was so happy with it! It clearly made her feel special and she wore it to the sweet shop and the beach with pride.
Happy summer memories. 💚
What simple happy memories are you making this summer?

What’s your favourite thing about Easter?
I love any excuse for special family time, the focus on rebirth, new life and fresh starts… and a basket full of chocolate doesn’t hurt either!
Storing some happy memories of today here in this post. I’d love to hear any of your favourite memories or traditions.
Emily 💚

World Book Day 2022
Just had to share some pics!
We had the best bookish day both at home and in school 🙂
So many fun costumes! Did you see any amazing ones in the school playground? I like to get some inspiration for next year 😁 📕

In case you can’t tell!…
Rosie as Hermione Granger (Harry Potter books). Note the potions cover she made!
Lottie as a witch (Room on the Broom).
Poppy as Princess Pearl (Zog and the Flying Doctors).

The Big Garden Bird Watch is a great thing to do with your Littles. It’s free to join in and very accessible even if your isolating at home like me at the moment! Here’s some simple play-based learning ideas to add to your weekend bird watching. 💚

Anyone else fancy hibernating in this cold wet season?! 🙋‍♀️
💚Please Like and Save this Post for later.
I wanted to add a seasonal book to our collection but I didn’t want it to be Christmas themed.
Our Littles have been fascinated with hibernation, burrows and den building etc. so this book seemed perfect.
It’s beautifully illustrated and written. It follows a child and Grandparent as they see the changes in the world around them from a summer visit to winter time.
I liked that there’s a small fact section at the back all about hibernation and the different kinds of animals that hibernate.
All three Littles enjoyed this book. Our 2yo went off and pretended to be a dormouse in a blanket nest! Our 5yo was so interested to learn about how some fish and reptiles can slow their breathing. We talked about meditation and how we can relax by slowing our breathing slightly. Our 8yo enjoyed using the factual section of the book and it inspired her to find out more.

This is a lovely book to share, read and learn with both at home or in school. Ideal for science / understanding the world type learning and extending children’s vocabulary.

📖 Winter Sleep - a hibernation story
By Sean Taylor & Alex Morss
Illustrated by Cinyee Chiu

“Can I make a house for Rabbit?”
“You mean a burrow? Rabbits don’t live in houses like ours you know.”

And so we went in search of some pictures of burrows and some junk modelling materials to make a home for Rabbit.

I realised that I already had a perfect book to go alongside this activity too. I really love this wildlife sticker book from and 💚

I really love that it’s all about British wildlife as we are in the UK. So many children’s books focus on animals that they will never see in their local area and I’d much rather we start of by learning about the natural environment and the animals she might see in our walks.

The illustrations in this book are beautiful and not at all gaudy. They use natural tones and enough realism that children can recognise the animals.
There’s just enough information on each page for a young reader to take in. Although we haven’t used it yet, I also really enjoyed the list of British wildlife depicted at the back of the book for children to tick off when / if they see them.

If you flick to the last couple of pictures you can see the fantastic model all three of my children decided to make together. They made a tree (if you can’t tell!) with homes for an owl and squirrels in the branches and burrows and setts for badgers and rabbits underneath.





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Phonics - Blending - Early Reading
⭐️ Please Save this Post if you think it’ll be useful.
✈️ Share with others who might find be interested.

This is a long but hopefully useful Post! All the info. is in the images.

I’ll be going Live this week, talking about blending and early reading.
So let me know if there’s something you’d like me to cover.

Leave your questions about your Littles’ blending/reading in the comments and I’ll get back to you.
Emily 💚




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