The new Reception class have settled in well and they are really
enjoying their new school.
The four themes of the Early Years Foundation Stage are:
A Unique Child Every child is a competent learner from birth who can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured.
Positive Relationships Children learn to be strong and independent from a base of loving and secure relationships.
Enabling Environments The environment plays a key role in supporting and extending children's development and learning.
Learning and Development Children develop and learn in different ways and at different rates and all areas of learning and development are equally important and inter-connected.
Young children learn best through play, so we aim to make our activities fun and exciting. We use the outdoor space on a daily basis, and we have our garden, the environmental area, the playground and the park to explore. We cover the six areas of the Foundation Stage Curriculum each day. The six areas of learning are:
Personal, Social and Emotional Development
Communication, Language and Literacy
Problem Solving, Reasoning & Number
Physical Development
Creative Development
Knowledge and Understanding of the World
We are very lucky to have 3 teachers, two nursery nurses and a classroom assistant in our Reception team.
This means we can do lots of extra activities such as cooking and fun creative lessons, as well as
the hard work of learning how to
read and write!
We are very lucky and grateful to have two parents who come in frequently to help with our garden and listen to readers.
We read the big book “Anna’s Multicoloured Glasses”by Wendy Body. We made our own glasses that change the colour of things when we look through them.
We tie-dyed hankies using different colours to make a giant
collage of 'Elmer' the elephant: another book we enjoyed listening to written by David Mckee.
We have been learning about technology around us from using simple tape recorders and digital cameras to using laptops and simple video recording equipment to make our own short animated clips using some of the toy animals from our classroom. We are also getting very good at using the
interactive white board!
Each week we have a lesson in the computer suite using our PC's to teach us basic skills like how to control the mouse to draw pictures. Here we have made rainbow coloured Kaleidoscope pictures.
Towards the end of October we learnt about festivals and celebrations. We have learnt all about Diwali and as you can see we
had great fun acting out the story of Rama and Sita. We followed a trail of Diva lamps around the Forest School and discovered Sita hiding in the laurel cave. We helped her escape from the evil Ravana.
We made our own Diwali cards by stencilling a rangoli pattern onto card.
We met Guy Fawkes (Mrs Newbury - dressed up!) He told us his story and then we searched around the Forest School to find pictures of him. We used adjectives to describe Guy Fawkes. Jack said, "He has a nasty smile." Ben said, "He was fierce" and Lauren said, "He is naughty" We enjoyed role playing the story.
We made our own firework paintings and models. We made our own miniature bonfire night scenes. In our computer lesson we created exploding firework displays using bright colours.
We have been looking at the human skeleton and what our different bones look like and how they are connected to each other.
Here are some of the skeleton pictures we made using different materials of our own choice.
We are lucky enough to have a sand tray in our classroom. We have access to this all the time.
Here we have taken it outdoors and we're pretending to be archaeologists digging for bones in the sand!
We like playing in the sand and water at school. There is always something to investigate in there, for example, wooden or foam letters or numbers. Sometimes the sand is a different colour, or even sparkly and scented! We have a range of toys and measuring equipment in different sizes and shapes to explore capacity. We learn about floating and sinking. We can talk with our friends, share and take turns. We find out about materials using all our senses. We ask questions about why things happen and how things work.
We have access to a variety of outdoor equipment and we have been outside at every opportunity before the weather gets too cold! The tunnel is very popular, we have had lots of fun playing in it.
We have also been developing our gross motor skills by practising riding the bikes and scooters and learning how to share with each other.
The children especially enjoy the outdoor construction equipment we have and enjoy building them up and especially knocking them down!
The bikes have numbers on and we have to rent the bikes by writing our names and the number of the bike we want from the Bike Hire Shop.
During the day the children have lots of opportunities to make their own choices. This includes time to access a variety of resources, activities and areas, such as painting, writing table, book corner, dress up area, role play area, investigation area, malleable area, problem solving area, jigsaws, Numeracy and Literacy activities and many, many more!
Forest School covers all areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage and we really enjoy our Fridays in the woods. We use our senses to find out about the woodland and the changing seasons. We wrote our names with special twig pencils onto leaves and hung them on the trees for Mr Owl, the Forest School headmaster, so he can see who has attended this week.
We have a theme for the week's activities but the sessions evolve through the children’s needs and interests. We have a story and sometimes a woodland visitors... (who always looks a little bit like Mrs Newbury) and then our imaginations can start running wild.
We read the story of Percy the Park keeper by Nick Butterworth and the children were given an oak leaf to see if they could find the tree it came from. This gave us the idea for a leaf bingo game that we played the following week. We had photocopies of the leaves in our area and we had to stick on the leaves with glue when we found them.
We also planted bulbs like Percy did in the book.
Summer had a phone call from Percy back at school and he said he was bringing a dinosaur back from his holiday and that we needed to make a shelter for him at Forest School so we did this too with tarpaulin and string and bits of old carpet.
We found a ruined Pixie village made from little wooden blocks (they had stolen them from our classroom) the Fat-Bottomed dragon had sat on it so we needed to rebuild it for them. Phoebe pretended to be a tour guide and led coach tours to the village and we were the tourists. There were even souvenirs to buy. We also made houses for the fairies out of twigs and leaves. One group made a huge castle for the fairy King.
The best week was when we read the story of StickMan by Julia Donaldson, our favourite author. We made our own stickmen pets to look after at home and we even had adoption certificates.
Other festivals and celebrations we have looked at this term are: Hanukkah, birthdays, christenings and weddings. We made our own greeting cards which we pretended to sell in our home corner which we turned into a role play gift shop where we could buy stamps, cards and gift bags.
As Christmas approached we had lots of fun with glitter and glue making Christmas cards, Calendars, Santas and Christmas tree ornaments!
We also spent many hours practising our Christmas Nativity play, which if your were lucky enough to be able to see, you will probably agree that we did a wonderful job!
All term we have been learning our Jolly Phonics; we really enjoy learning our new sounds, with the actions, stories and songs that go with them.
We are getting more and more confident to read and spell words by ourselves.
Want to know more about
'Jolly Phonics' and how to help your child? Click on the link button below.
Here are some pictures of us doing P.E. On this particular day we were out on the playground learning to twirl the ribbons, rotate the hoops and practise our catching skills.
In our P.E lesson in the hall we have danced to a song about bones and held some spooky posses.
In November we made up some firework dances and zoomed about like rockets! We love dancing to the 'Animal Action' song. We have to move like various animals which is great fun!
We have introduced a new video link area on our Learning Platform.
These videos will be updated and added to each new term when possible.
Click on the link button to view our current school videos!
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