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!

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!

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. 😎

 

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.

Settled in!

 Everybody is so pleased at how well Early Years have settled in now they have nearly completed their first half term at school. We have been learning our first sounds in phonics - by the end of the half term we will have introduced 's, a, t, p, i, n'. We have been reading different fairytales and practising retelling them by acting them out and using story maps.

We have been practising our letters in different ways.

The children have been helping to make props and decorations for our new roleplay area.

We have been practising teamwork with our new friends.

The children have asked to do some work with Spiderman so we added him to the writing area which got lots of children involved in mark making.

Another exciting addition to Early Years are our Curiosity Cubes. We have been adding different things to these and placing them by the snack area to encourage the children to have discussions with each other. This has helped generate lots of new vocabulary.

Welcome to Early Years!

 Welcome to all our new year R children and their families! Last week we had family meetings so the children could visit their new classroom and this week we have had a lovely stay and play session too. The children have been really good at coming in without their adults and settling in to their classes. They have been making friends with some new children and some have found friends they knew from preschool. 

We have our new small world area and construction zone in the shared area. The classes will get allocated slots where they can access these spaces while they learn to use the resources and practise tidying up after themselves.

We have been exploring our surroundings and getting used to the rules and routines of school. Lots of the children have been drawing and mark making in different areas of their classrooms. We have been using mirrors to look at our skin tone to try and mix paints for our self portraits. Small World role-play has been very popular with the children starting to create their own stories and using lots of sound effects!

Down on the farm

We are all enjoying our 'down on the farm' topic this half term and have been reading lots of different books about farms, animals and vegetables. This week we have listened to the story 'Supertato' and were inspired to create our own superhero vegetables. We talked about how to attach different parts to our vegetables and the children talked about the special powers they each had. We are very impressed by the results!

We are looking at creating and continuing different patterns. We are exploring patterns with shapes and patterns with colours. Some children have challenged themselves to do both at the same time! This is something we will keep practising in school and that you could practise at home too.

The children explored different techniques to create their own farm animals. They worked with adults to think about different ideas and what materials we could use to collage - over the next days the children had a chance to apply these skills independently in the art area. Our walls are now full of lots of unique farm animals!

As well as all of the farm fun, we are still enjoying all of the other things that school has to offer: sharing books together, learning new sounds in phonics, practising adding and taking away amounts in maths, looking after outdoor area (including keeping an eye on the bug hotel and tadpoles) and much, much more!

 

Spring has sprung!

 

In Early Years, we had a very exciting egg delivery! The children made predictions about what they thought would hatch from the eggs. We had all sorts of ideas: ducks, crocodiles, snakes, chickens and even dinosaurs! Once they hatched we watched them get stronger and more confident. We have noticed that their wing feathers have started to change. All of the children had the opportunity to hold and stroke the chicks and we talked about how to do this safely.

The chicks have inspired lots of different art work and writing. Children have been describing the chicks after looking at them carefully.

As well as this, we have also been watching some tadpoles develop - they arrived to us as frogspawn and we created them a pond area outdoors so we can observe them as they change and grow into frogs! 

Lots of learning!

 As always, our children have been working their socks off now they're back into the swing of things in school again. 

We have been practising making words in different ways, using magnets, cutting out letters, using sand and glitter as well as by writing onto paper. Some of the children are writing sentences about our 'around the world' topic talking about different places and animals. 

Each class have enjoyed being creative in their art areas. We have had lots of free choice with different materials for collage and making - creating jewellery has been very popular! We have experimented with different ways of using colour including using marbles to roll around on paint in trays and using food colouring on shaving foam for printing.

Maple Class spent a very long time sorting out the Hama beads into colours to make it easier when they were making patterns on the boards. It took 45 minutes with the help of an adult and lead to lots of interesting conversations about shades and tones of colours as well as estimating the amount of beads in our hands or the amount of time it was taking!

The staff have been busy making dough and the children still love creating different textures with the rollers and using cutters to make different shapes. We love finding different ways to make our hands nice and strong for writing and drawing!

All of the children are just about ready for the Easter holidays ... just one more week of amazing work to do and they can finally have a bit of a rest after a busy term working at home and school :-)

Settling back in

 We are so pleased that all of the children have come back to join us in Early Years! They have taken the time away from the building in their stride and area pleased to be back in their classrooms with their friends and teachers again. We have spent the week settling back in and remembering the routines that are in place in school and applying some of those skills we have been practising during home learning and key-worker provision since January. 

We have been remembering how to do careful counting using different resources and matching amounts to numerals.

There is a lot of independent writing going on - we are using word mats to help us with some of our trickier topic words. This week the children have been writing about Arctic and Antarctic animals after we read the story 'Poles Apart' by Jeanne Willis and Jarvis.

Lots of teamwork has been happening in our new role-play areas and with our construction toys. The children have been talking with each other about models they are making and working out what bits they might need next.

The adults have enjoyed being able to play some different games with the children and have been really impressed with their turn-taking skills. We are getting good at recognising the number we have rolled on a dice without having to count all of the dots.

And of course, there has been lots of practising of our tricky words that we are learning to read. The children have enjoyed uncovering the words and reading them aloud.

A big thank you again for all of the support during home learning and hopefully we won't need to worry about that again any time soon!

Home Learning

 We are all so impressed with the effort that our families have been putting in with their home learning over the last few weeks. We thought we would share with you some of the fantastic work that has been going on.

This is just a small selection of the things we are being sent every day but as you can tell, there is a lot going on! We are very excited to see all the children back next week for the remainder of the spring term 😁😁