Nursery

This half term’s topic is based around the story of ‘The Tiny Seed’ by Eric Carle. Children will be strengthening their pencil grips and improving their pencil control through fun, interactive activities such as taking part in an International ‘Dough Disco’ with Shonette Bason. Phonics and shared reading sessions will support early reading and writing skills. Children will be developing their love of books through sharing books daily with others at school and home. Children will be supported to share their ideas to others in a sentence.

Children will learn about the lifecycle of a plant. They will grow their own sunflowers and discover what their plant needs to stay healthy. They will record its progress with drawings, labels and photographs.

Children will practise counting and number recognition through Ten Town activities and through solving everyday real life problems. Children will compare quantities and gain a deepened understanding of numbers represented in different ways. Children will also make comparisons of the size of different objects such as plants and vegetables.

Children will be learning how to take care of the environment through developing the sensory garden area and exploring all of their senses. Plants and vegetables will be grown to help ‘Mr McGregor’. A surprise visitor (Peter Rabbit) will join the children when the project is complete and share some carrot cake made by the children themselves with the produce they have grown. Children will be exploring a variety of fruit and veg that is grown in our country and elsewhere around the world. Children will be supported to use a variety of questions so they can discover more. Children’s fine motor skills such as cutting, modelling and drawing will be applied to weave their own picnic baskets and design their very own miniature garden.

As our over-arching topic is ‘Emergency’, the children will be looking at the jobs of people who help us, developing their understanding of what an emergency is and who can help in an emergency situation. Our role play area has been transformed into a Hospital to allow children to learn more about the hospital and get into character of being a doctor or nurse! As well as this, there will be lots of opportunities for PSHE circle times, discussion feelings and emotions in different situations.

In Read, Write, Inc this half term, we will be further developing the blending skill, whilst learning more of the Set 1 sounds. We continuously revisit previously learnt sounds to ensure that these are deeply embedded. The children have really engaged with learning numbers through Ten Town and enjoy listening to each individuals song, which helps to embed understanding of that number. The children have now learnt numbers to 10, their formation and which order they occur. Children will be embedding this knowledge this half term, whilst learning the ‘cardinal principle’, knowing to stop when the required total is reached. In Literacy, children will be continuing to develop their letter formation, including practising writing their name each morning. As well as this, children will be developing their retrieval skills, answering questions about the story and continuing to develop their recognition and understanding of rhyme.

This half term, our exciting role play area has transformed into the construction site of the Three Little Pigs house—the one made from bricks! As a class we will be exploring a range of traditional tales. We will be retelling stories, learning repetitive parts of stories which enable us to join in and learning how a story has a beginning, middle and end!  During Maths lessons, we will be continuing to develop our subitising skills—quickly recognising amounts up to 5. As well as embedding numbers that we have already learnt, we will learn to count beyond 10, compare number quantities and understand the terms more and less.

Our new topic this half term is 'The Wonderful World of Rhyme'. During this unit, we will continue to explore a range of Nursery Rhymes, discover what it means when two words rhyme and apply our phonic knowledge to recognise and discover words that rhyme. The children will be able to take a rhythmical trip in our rhyming bus role play area or hunt around the home corner for things around that house that rhyme! Throughout the topic, children will have access to rhyming games and will have the opportunity to create their own rhymes in music with the instruments - so there will be lots of opportunity to make some noise!

In literacy, we will continue to practise writing our names as well as focusing on recognising the initial sounds of words and continue to grow and extend our phonic knowledge. In writing, we will be focusing on creating pieces of work around 'Humpty Dumpty' and in reading we will be developing our retell and sequencing skills in order to retell the nursery rhymes we have been learning.

In Maths, we will be consolidating our knowledge of numbers up to 5 and practising formation of these, whilst being able to speedily recognise amounts up to 5. In addition to this, we will be learning the names of 2D shapes and the properties of these shapes, whilst exploring how we can create new shapes by combining shapes.

During Read, Write, Inc sessions, we will be continuing to learn new sounds, as well as embedding our newly learnt sounds ‘m’ ‘a’ ‘s’ ‘d’ and ‘t’ from last half term (see separate handout providing information about how you can support your child with this at home’. In addition to learning new sounds, we will be introducing blending sounds to make simple CVC words from the sounds the children have already learnt, such as ‘mad’ ‘sad’ ‘mat’ and ‘sat’.

In Maths, we will be continuing to focus on learning to count to 10 and recognising these numbers. We will be using Ten Town number stories to ensure that when writing the numbers 1 to 10 they are formed correctly.

Our topic is ‘Winter Wonderland’ and therefore this half term will be focused all around the Winter seasons and the festivities that occur during this season. In Science, we will explore freezing and melting and link this to the weather we experience during the winter season. The children will be learning about bonfire night and creating firework night sky scenes, later on in the half term we will continue to extend our learning and mark making through writing letters and a list of presents to Santa, we will continue to practise writing our names and begin to use some clearly identifiable letters.

Initially, the main focus will be on ensuring that all children become settled, confident and aware of the routines and expectations within the nursery setting at Crescent. During our topic sessions we will be talking about ourselves, what makes us unique, our families and getting to know our peers. We will be learning about the different parts of the body and discussing our features, again looking at similarities and differences to our peers. Our main story focus will be based on ’Peppa Pig’ and we will explore the different experiences Peppa has and how we can relate to them ourselves. We will have lots of opportunities to be creative as create self portraits using different mediums of art and we will also learn lots of new songs. The children will begin to learn the inital sounds during their Read, Write, Inc sessions and begin to learn letter formation. Our role play area has been transformed into an autumnal home corner where we can role play all the jobs that our family members do around the house. There are also plenty of opportunities for us to mark make as we draw pictures and write shopping lists.