Preparations for Chinese New Year have been in full swing in EYFS this week. Our classroom are liven up with the colourful decorations and in Mandarin, all students in each year group have been learning about the importance of this time of year.
Reception have been representing the Early Years phase this week in the filming of the whole school's Chinese New Year concerts. It has been a delight to see the children excited to be part of this event and see their maturity as they confidently performed for the filming.
Next week Early Years look forward to joining the whole school in further Chinese New Year celebrations. In the meanwhile, please enjoy reading all about our week in Early Years.
Pre-Nursery
‘Brinng, Brinng, Doctor Please!’
Pre-Nursery have been exploring the world of a doctor this week through the rhyme ‘Miss Polly Had a Dolly’. Poor Miss Polly’s dolly has been sick all week and we have been helping to take care of it. Pre-Nursery have had fun pretending to be doctors as they identified what is the matter with Miss Polly’s dolly. We have taken dolly’s temperature, given dolly medicine, and checked the heartbeat with a stethoscope.
During our imaginative doctor role-play Pre-Nursery have enjoyed identifying body parts that may be hurt using picture labels to match these to a body template and bandage poor Dolly up to make her feel better. Along with our role-play, we have learnt about the important red cross sign we see when at the doctors or hospital and on ambulances.
To finish our learning of Miss Polly Had a Dolly, Pre-Nursery enjoyed a visit to our school Nurse, Miss Lily. Here we saw all her nurse’s tools and learnt about her role in the school.
Nursery
The Ugly Duckling tale has taught Nursery the importance of being inclusive in play and to celebrate our differences. During role-play of the story, children have reflected on the feelings of the Ugly Duckling and how lonely it may have felt to be excluded from play.
Nursery have excitedly watched as ducks hatched from eggs in a nest and learnt about the migration of birds to warmer places during the winter. We observed the key features of our ducks, noticing the webbed feet of our feathered friends, and watched as they swam speedily in the pond.
Nursery have sung along to Five Little Ducks, using their fingers to count and puppets to reenact the classic nursery rhyme. They have noted the changing numbers as ducks went missing and attempted to write number symbols from one to five during our sing-a-longs.
Reception
What a busy week we have had in Reception! In Phonics this week we were learning the sounds: qu, ch and sh. We practised reading and writing words and sentences containing these sounds. During our Literacy lessons, we learnt about the features of non-fiction writing and have planned an information page about our favourite dinosaurs which we will be writing next week, ready for our ‘Reception Dinosaur Book.’
During Maths we collected data whilst learning how to create a ‘tally chart’ using the information collected. We found out lots of things such as what Reception’s favourite dinosaurs and foods are and displayed this information.
In Topic we began to create our own ‘Dinosaur Dens,’ thinking about the environments that dinosaurs lived in. We are very excited to take these home next week!
Isla Gillespie
Head of Early Years
