Tuesday 11 October 2022

Off to a good start!

Year R have settled in and are nearing the end of their first half term already! We have been very busy learning all of the routines of school life and making new friends.

Everybody has completed their own self portrait - we will do these again at the very end of the year to see how our painting and observation skills have developed whilst in Year R.


Lots of developing our gross motor skills to make sure our bodies are ready to write! 


Using different small world set ups helps to use our imagination, develop our communication skills and gives us a chance to play with different children. 


After half term we look forward to seeing the changes in weather and to practising our Nativity - which seems a long way away yet!


Wednesday 13 July 2022

End of the year!

 





Here are a few highlights from an amazing year with our Early Years children - have a look at all of our blogs from throughout the rest of the year. We are sad to see them move up to year 1 but they are definitely ready and we wish them the best of luck!

Thursday 17 March 2022

Longer days are nearly here...

 As always, we have been super busy in Early Years! This term our topic is Land, Sea & Sky and we have been looking at different animals and the world around us. We have read a lot of different stories including Handa's Suprise, Baby Goes to Market, Rainbow Fish & Sharing a Shell. These books have helped us to see similarities and differences between places and people as well as learning some important things about friendship and sharing.

We are still keeping a track of how our year is going and thinking about the seasons and the weather. We have started to see some early signs of spring on our way to school and in our outdoor area - it has been nice to have some slightly warmer days! So far this half term, we have talked about some different celebrations such as St David's Day & St Patrick's Day - it has been fun to learn about things that are important to different poeple.



In our maths work, we are becoming number experts and can find lots of different ways to make other numbers. When we looked at number 8, lots of children made spiders and octopus creations with the correct number of legs. We have been using a 10s frame to help us see different quantities and work out how many more we would need to fill up the frame. Numberblocks is a firm favourite in Early Years - Octoblock seems to be lots of children's favourite character from the show. 



We are continuing to work on our fine motor skills to keep our hands strong and supple to be ready for writing - Maple Class recently enjoyed weaving different materials into the number frames! As the half term goes on we are looking forward to talking about even more types of celebration and having longer, warmer days. 😎
 

Thursday 13 January 2022

Spring Term

 It has been lovely to see so many keen faces coming back this term after our Christmas break. We have started our new topic 'Land, Sea, Sky' where we are learning about the world around us. We started with reading 'Handa's Surprise' which has been great for talking about another country and looking at similarities and differences between places as well as talking about different fruits and our preferences. 

In our shared area we have our tricky words displayed - these are the words we have been learning in phonics and we can add to the board as the year goes on.



We have also been looking at how things have changed as the year has gone on and the seasons are changing. We can look at that display to remind us of the things we have already done and we can see how the seasons affect our outdoor area as we compare the photographs throughout the year.


In maths, we are doing a lot of work on subitising and careful counting using a range of different resources. 


Some of our new role play areas for the term include a 'seaside', an 'underwater cave', a 'safari' and a 'pirate ship'.


Each class now has their own set of blocks that can be accessed every day as part of the continuous provision - it has been great to see some of the ideas the children have had with their building. It has also helped to develop our sharing and teamwork skills.