A Happy New Year to all our EYFS students and families. I do hope you all had a wonderful, restful Winter break full of family fun. It has been a pleasure to welcome back all our EYFS students this week along with some new students who have joined the phase. On Tuesday it was wonderful to see how excited all the children were to be back at school and see them jump right back into their learning.
This half term each year group have new fun topics to explore that captive creativity, imagination, and language development. Pre-Nursery will be focusing on ‘Nursery Rhymes, Nursery look at the wonderful world of ‘Traditional Tales’ and Reception will be going back in time as they explore the amazing ‘Dinosaurs’.
Please continue to read on to see what each year group have been up to.
Pre-Nursery
Pre-Nursery have kick started 2021 with their topic ‘Nursery Rhymes’, in this topic the children will be developing their language skills through simple repetitive vocabulary and phrases preparing them for future storytelling.
This week the children have been introduced to a friend called ‘Incy Wincy’, an adorable little spider who likes to climb spouts! Throughout the week Pre-Nursery have been learning the rhyme with actions, understanding how to sequence the rhyme using our visual picture prompts and learning all about spiders.
We have all had fun counting spider legs, going on a baby spider hunt around the indoor playground, exploring making playdough spiders using different mix media and getting messy making drizzle glitter spider webs.
Pre-Nursery staff have been amazed at all the children’s work and enthusiasm this week and look forward to seeing Pre-Nursery become confident Nursery Rhyme tellers over the half term.
Nursery
Nursery indulged in fun dramatic play this week as we retold parts of our traditional tale, ‘The Three Little Pigs’. The children identified characters and events that took place and cleverly used pictures to sequence and create a story map using their great cutting and pasting skills.
We listened to sounds we could hear in the words of our story and sang along to songs using our special sounds. Nursery enjoyed mixing red and white paint to experiment with making pink paint and make our pig masks and then used our masks to act out our story. We experimented with interesting villain voices to play the Big Bad Wolf and squeaky high pitch sounds to mimic our Little Pigs.
In math, Nursery made houses from popsicle sticks and cleverly patterned squares, rectangles, and triangles to complete a collage house. We have also identified a new shape: rectangle, learning how many sides it has bey counting them.
Nursery have enjoyed letting their imaginations take hold and confidently demonstrated their joy of learning!
Reception
This week Reception have been introduced to their new topic Dinosaurs! We learnt that lots of dinosaurs lay eggs and we looked at how they protect their eggs. We also looked at the different animals today that lay eggs and the lengths they go to protect them.
In literacy, we focused on segmenting and blending. Using the sounds and tricky words we have learnt so far, we practised reading and writing short captions including ‘pat the dog’, ‘the tap is on’. The children also came up with some descriptive words to describe some of the different dinosaurs and used these words to create their own dinosaur.
In maths, the children were introduced to money, why we need it and how it can be earned. We observed money from different countries and then took a closer look at money used in the UK. We sorted coins by colour, shape, and size before ordering them by value.
We look forward to discovering more about dinosaurs next week.
Isla Gillespie
Head of Early Years
