This time of year is always exciting for both students and staff as we eagerly prepare for our Winter Concerts. In EYFS, students are always collaborating to support and inspire each other to achieve our best. This is no different when it comes to our Early Years students performing. To inspire our singing skills, all of EYFS have joined together for Winter Concert singing practice. Here the students can learn together, help and support each other with their confidence to sing and collaborate across the phase. Our first practice went superbly, and I was incredibly impressed by the excellent listening, singing and working together. Well done Early Years!

In class, after saying bye to our first term topics, all our EYFS classes have begun delving into new concepts and ideas through our second topics of the year. Pre-Nursery are discovering all about themselves through ‘Me and My Senses’, Nursery are leaping into ‘Seasons and Celebrations’, while Reception are discovering about ‘Festivals and Celebrations’. To find out more about the topic your child is learning about please do look at the topic curriculum overview on Tapestry. Here you will be able to see key concepts your child will be learning about each week.

Pre-Nursery

There has been a lot of stretching, wiggling, stamping and jumping as Pre-Nursery began their topic ‘Me and My Senses’. Pre-Nursery have got active this week through the song ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ to learn about the different parts of their bodies. We have had tremendous fun dancing away as we learned to name and identify parts of our body and loved matching our body part visuals to our extra-large body template.

Using our sense of ‘sight’ Pre-Nursery donned their binoculars to hunt for different coloured leaves on our outdoor learning adventure. It was great to see how much the children have remembered about colours from our previous topic as they could independently sort all the leaves, they had collected into colour groups.

Amazing work Pre-Nursery. Next week we move onto learning about facial features and emotions.

Nursery

Nursery have indulged in the colourful sites of Autumn this week. Children enjoyed nature walks and collecting Autumn leaves to complete our Hedgehog Leaf Art collage and got busy counting out acorns to feed to our squirrel.

We learnt all about the changing environment the season brings and the types of animals that scurry around busily feeding in preparation for Winter. Following Fancy Dress Day, we spoke more about the abundance of pumpkins in Autumn and examined the lifecycle of apples that are harvested by farmers at this time of year.

Next week we continue our journey learning about seasons and explore the changes to look forward to that come in Winter.

Reception

It has been another exciting week of learning in Reception! We continued our topic Festivals and Celebrations this week by learning about Firework night, an annual UK celebration every November. We watched and listened to different firework displays and thought of some descriptive language which we used to create our very own poems. We also learnt about the importance of firework safety.

In Phonics this week we learnt the sounds ‘o and c’. The children enjoyed creating their own octopuses and caterpillars and worked very hard whilst practising making words using the sounds that they have learnt so far.

During Maths we were learning all about data handling. Reception helped their teachers to pick a colour for a new shirt to buy and displayed the results as a pictogram. They learnt how to read different pictograms and even had a go at filling in their own pictogram independently.

We look forward to more fun learning next week!

Isla Gillespie

Head of Early Years