As the Autumn term comes to an end it is wonderful to reflect on all the achievements of each individual EYFS child here at Britannica. In every class every child has made progress in all areas of learning. From our Pre-Nursery who are now forging friendships and learning to use their voices, Nursery who have found their identities, strengths in storytelling and counting abilities, to our Reception who are now flying at their phonological abilities.

The whole EYFS team are immensely proud of all your hard work and achievements. Well done Early Years what a fantastic end to 2020 and here is to a brilliant 2021 when we return.

I wish all our Early Years families a wonderful, joyous Winter holiday and wish you all a Happy New Year.

Pre-Nursery

It has definitely been the ‘most wonderful time of the year!’ here in Pre-Nursery as the children have had fun playing in fake snow, learning about different smells at Christmas time and sorting Santa’s ‘big’ and ‘small’ presents.

As we celebrate this festive season, Pre-Nursery have had much fun creating wonderful sparkly artwork from Christmas trees with finger paint baubles to stockings with mix-media. The children have learnt about Rudolph the red nosed reindeer and loved creating their own reindeer food using oats, corn, and rice. We even added a nice leaf for the reindeers to crunch on.

All our Pre-Nursery staff would like to congratulate each and everyone of Pre-Nursery for their amazing achievements over the Autumn term. We look forward to seeing you after the Winter holiday ready for some ‘Nursery Rhyme’ fun in our new topic.

Nursery

Nursery children have really shown their progression and talent in these last few weeks of term, singing along to songs proudly on stage and forming strong social connections with each other and teachers.

This week we played with all the exciting activities we have enjoyed across this term such as filling and emptying containers to describe capacity; creating sets of number groups with beads and matching them to numbers; cooking in the kitchen and naming and sorting our vegetables and fruit and of course using our fine motor skills and developing handling skills to cut and paste pictures.

Children are showing much interest in the marks they see around them and have become keen listeners, identifying sounds and sounding out some of the sounds they hear in words. This week we played a fun game of naming the objects found in our silly soup of toys and listening to the sounds we can hear. Nursery practiced writing their names on cards and enjoyed playing with puzzles that resulted in a sequence of story events.

Well done Nursery and Merry Christmas to our families!

Reception

This week sees the end of our first term in Reception and it has been another exciting and fun filled one!

In Phonics the children learnt the tricky word ‘into’ and the sound ‘ss.’ Children practiced writing sentences including ‘into’ and read and wrote words containing our new ‘ss’ sound. We also had fun writing Christmas lists and cards. During Maths we helped the elves to solve problems, including measuring footprints and continuing repeating patterns.

During Topic we learnt about the traditions of Christmas and the children created some beautiful Christmas crafts and decorations.

Merry Christmas EYFS!


Isla Gillespie

Head of Early Years