The first part of the Spring term has quickly come upon us and it has been delightful to see the progress of each child in Early Years. This half term the children in all year groups have been enthusiastic about their topics and learning and this has been evident in all the work they have produced. Reception have stomped their way through the topic Dinosaurs, Nursery have got dramatic with their storytelling of Traditional Tales, while Pre-Nursery have found their voices through reciting Nursery Rhymes.
In the final week of this term, we have had the pleasure of seeing Early Years revel in the Chinese New Year celebrations, showing how much they are a part of the whole school community here at Britannica.
Well done to Reception who represented the phase in the Chinese New Year performances, and we hope you all have enjoyed watching the school videos of these.
Please see below the Early Years winner of the Hong Bao 2021 competition:
The 1st Prize of EYFS: Elise Gu
The 1st Prize of EYFS: Sienna Van Den Bosch
The 2nd Prize of EYFS: Yiyuan Fang (Olivia)
The 2nd Prize of EYFS: Jiayi Pu (Victoria)
The 3rd Prize of EYFS: Ander Dobosz Mijangos
The 3rd Prize of EYFS: Koutaro Tanehashi
The 3rd Prize of EYFS: Edoardo Trazzi
Congratulations to you all.
Xin nian kuai le
Isla Gillespie
Head of Early Years
Pre-Nursery
Oh no! Humpty Dumpty has fallen off his wall!
There has been fun and excitement as Pre-Nursery explored Humpty Dumpty this week and how he cracks when he falls off the wall. The children exploded with excitement as they explored splat painting with real eggshells and paint. They balanced the eggshells along the wall and while reciting the rhyme pushed them off, then watched as the painted splatted everywhere!
Fantastic connections have been made between poor Humpty’s cracked head and the doctor from last week’s rhyme ‘Miss Polly had a Dolly’. When Pre-Nursery saw broken Humpty they all ran to get the doctor role-play kit to help fix poor Humpty. What a great idea Pre-Nursery had!
Along with our whole school community, Pre-Nursery loved joining in with our Chinese New Year celebrations. They enthusiastically watched the dragon dance and drumming and in class had the opportunity to learn about making dumplings and even tried the Chinese drums themselves.
What a wonderful way to finish the half term.
Nursery
Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar??? Nursery children were very excited to participate in the role play sing-a-long game this week following a story about a missing cookie! We used our language skills to respond to our friends during the song and nominated who we thought the cookie thief might be!
Nursery have enjoyed a week of drama and theatre performances! We explored aspects of theatre, costume, and character play. It was wonderful to observe children recalling events and taking on character traits from our villains and heroes read about during this terms topic, Traditional Tales.
We enjoyed a wonderful week of cultural activities in the lead up to Chinese New Year festivities, making dumplings and watching the dragon dance and drum performance on the outdoor field- a big stage!
Nursery got creative creating and using water paints to create story illustrations and made a Nursery picture book to share together and narrate using our superhero sentences!
Our Nursery are very inquisitive and eager number learners and enjoyed working through simple story number problems this week adding apples and cupcakes to Red Riding Hoods basket for grandma and recognising changing amounts! We enjoyed filling containers and experimenting with capacity.
Enjoy your holidays!
Reception
The children had a fantastic week learning all about Chinese New Year. They got involved in lots of different activities including dumpling making, writing Chinese characters, and dragon dancing!
We learnt about the story of how each year has a different animal name and reenacted the race between the 12 different animals.
Reception continued to learn more sounds in phonics, focusing on the diagraphs ‘th’ and ‘ng’. We reinforced these sounds by th th threading beads to make bracelets and creating a ‘strong’ dinosaur character.
In Maths we refreshed our memories on 3D shapes and took a closer look at their properties. We used smiley face stickers to count the faces on the different shapes and had fun creating patterns and drawings using the differed shaped faces.
It has been a busy and exciting term and we look forward to returning after Chinese New Year to begin our new topic, ‘Julia Donaldson’.
