Welcome to Early Years! We have 3 experienced teachers, Miss Pateman, Mrs Humber and Mr Lester, and are also supported by our fantastic team of teaching assistants. We have a huge learning space to explore and make the most of every day, spread across three classrooms and our outdoor area. We split into smaller groups with specific adults for parts of the day, and learn through a mixture of adult-led and child-led learning.       

• Starting out in Nursery - September 2021 
• Starting out in Reception - September 2021   
• Our curriculum map - find out about our current topics
• Our Early Years Curriculum

Home learning ideas:

• We use Tapestry to share work that we have done in school and share ideas for learning beyond school. Speak to Miss Pateman if you're not sure about how to log in.
• Constant practice of reading and phonics is just about the most valuable thing you can do at home. Try to read with your child as often as possible and talk to them about what they’ve read. 
• We have daily phonics sessions which follow the ReadWriteInc scheme. They have lots of guidance on how you can support your child with phonics at home here. 
• There are lots of resources to support learning around traditional stories available on the Oak Academy site - try starting with the The Three Billy Goats Gruff set of lessons, which you can find here. 
  
• Keep practicing counting, whenever and wherever possible - you could count houses on the way to School, footsteps on the way to bed, shoes in the house, players on the team, objects in the shopping trolley, claps, nods... Anything and everything you can think of!
• Support your child in building their imagination and storytelling, building things using big cardboard boxes and pieces of fabric, or dressing up and pretending to be nurse, doctors or parents.  

Our latest news:

• We were really excited to be able to run our first Stay & Play session of the year in Nursery and Reception in the Autumn Term. To keep the number of visitors down, we ran three separate sessions (one for each class group) on separate days - and it was great to see how many of our parents and carers were able to join us and share in our learning and play for an hour or so. It was great to see how confident all of the children were during the sessions, showing their visitors where everything was, sharing examples of work and drawing them into their play.
 

 
• Our focus story has been The Gingerbread Man, and linked to this we have made our own gingerbread, coloured, counted, written, drawn and read. 
 

 
• We have absolutely loved sharing our Tapestry journals this half term! It has helped develop our speaking, listening and communication skills. In class, many of us have been really excited to share what our parents have been putting online, and this has also helped our development. We also enjoy talking to our friends about what has been put online via the app and this has helped develop and strengthen friendships and connect us through common interests and experiences. 

We have been learning about... 

Child Initiated Learning - we have had the chance to try out a huge range of activities linked to learning, our own individual interests and our focus story, Whatever Next. As a result we have developed and widened our friendship circles, enabling us to engage with our environment and improve our speaking and listening skills. Many of us have made fantastic progress because of this. We always look forward to finding out what new activities and challenges have appeared in our classrooms each day and are also keen to find new ways to explore, use and play with the equipment and resources around us.

This term's topics

Communication & Language - We will be exploring rhyming words and the language of size this half-term, all linking in with the story of The Three Little Pigs. In particular, we will be focussing on Nick Sharatt’s fantastic version of the story. We will be visited by our (virtual) Mystery Story Teller to help develop our understanding of stories and give us the chance to discuss stories we know. We will also continue to develop our vocabulary through our Word of the Week. This half-term we will be focussing on scientific language, using words like waterproof, reflective, transparent and opaque. 

Personal, Social & Emotional Learning - This half-term we will be meeting our next learning superhero, Claudia Curiosity, whose powers are questioning, exploring, risk taking and challenging. We will continue to develop our co-operative and turn-taking skills through lots of turn-taking games and discussion, as well as acting out our stories in small groups.

Physical Development - In our weekly PE sessions with Mr Butler, we will continue to develop our spatial awareness, finding space, moving towards and away from each other, and travelling and stopping with control. We will also be visiting Fairlands Park to help develop our physical gross motor skills. Finally, we will be continuing with our ‘Marvellous Mark Making’ sessions, both inside and outside, to practice our fine motor skills.

Take a look at our curriculum map for more information on our topics.