The wonderful aspect of Early Years is its flexibility and diversity over how learning objectives can be delivered and achieved. As an Early Years educator, one of my loves for Early Years learning is seeing children continually develop their knowledge and skills through consolidating their learning in continuous provision. Every week when walking into an EYFS classroom, you will see previous week's activities out and available to children where they are actively using these independently developing their skills in numerous ways. This week I was reminded of the utmost importance of providing this as I observed enthusiastic Pre-Nursery students actively retelling ‘Incy Wincy Spider’, using the previous week's small world and props. It was a delight to behold and something I know every one of our EYFS staff sees in all our classrooms weekly.
Please continue to read on to hear the wonderful week all our EYFS students have had.
Pre-Nursery
Pre-Nursery have done a fantastic job of keeping the rain away this week as we learned all about the weather through the rhyme ‘Rain, Rain Go Away!’. We have had fun pretending to dress up for a rainy-day using wellington boots, raincoats, and using a lovely big umbrella to pretend to splash in puddles. Along with this, we have consolidated our learning about families by using the names of people we know while singing our rhyme. Well done Pre-Nursery!
The children have had so much fun around the concept of rain, especially exploring their pre-phonic listening skills as we identify rainy weather noises and even had the chance to create our own rain soundscape using our voices, rain sticks, and bodies.
Creatively we have enjoyed exploring watery art through wax-resistant painting and water paints. While also using a variety of mixed media to produce some beautiful sparkly colourful umbrellas which will be up on display in the corridors for the whole school to see.
Let’s hope all our rainy singing this week keeps the raindrops away!
Nursery
Nursery delved deeper into the magical world of storytelling this week enjoying the traditional tale, Little Red Riding Hood. The children have come to understand the role of a villain and a hero in a story and have enjoyed using their drama skills to recall and act out characters from the story.
We have been excited to exercise our writing skills, drawing scenes and characters from the story, and enjoyed making our own character puppets.
Nursery expressed their feelings about Little Red Riding Hood walking alone in the forest and together we discussed the importance of not talking to strangers and keeping ourselves safe. We sang and danced to a wonderful song about Little Red Riding Hood with warnings about being safe in the forest.
Nursery enjoyed making a breakfast basket and learned about caring for sick Grandma and cleverly set up picnics and breakfast plates for poorly grandma during play activities.
In Mathematics, Nursery explored changing amounts and using Numicon tools, experimented with some simple conceptual understanding of number problems. What a wonderful week of quality learning and growth in Nursery!
Reception
This week in Phonics Reception have been learning the letter sounds: j, v, w and x. The children worked very hard, reading and writing words containing these sounds and wrote captions using the new sounds along with those that we have already learnt.
During Mathematics the children had lots of fun developing their knowledge of weight. We compared the weights of different items in our classroom and used vocabulary such as heavier and lighter to describe our findings. The children worked as a team to find objects that were heavier and lighter than a teddy bear.
In Topic lessons Reception continued to learn about Dinosaurs, the children developed their understanding of herbivores and carnivores and also learnt about animals that come from eggs; we made our own dinosaur eggs and are now waiting for them to hatch!
Isla Gillespie
Head of Early Years
