Early Years Foundation Stage

The children all settled back into Nursery life quickly following the Christmas break and did a super job of remembering our rules and routines. At the beginning of our Spring term, we had lots of new friends join us in Nursery, they all settled in well and quickly became a wonderful addition to our Nursery!

Our Spring 1 topic was ‘People Who Help Us’ and we kick started this by having some great discussions about all the different people who help us and what it is they do to help us. We spent time learning all about the Emergency Services, focusing on Police, Paramedics and Firefighters. We spoke about what they can do to help us in an emergency and even had a go at matching the Emergency Services with the different scenarios. We have also learnt about the importance of calling ‘999’ in an emergency. We were lucky to have three Police Officers visit us where they told us lots of information and we got to ask them some questions too. Our favourite part was when we got to wear the Police Officers hat and sit in their Police car! We have also spent time learning all about the roles of a dentist and a vet. We especially enjoyed exploring our Veterinary Surgery role play area where we put all our knowledge of vets to good use and helped to make all the animals better. During this topic we were also very lucky to have visits from two of our Parents one of whom is a children’s Doctor, it was so interesting to hear all about the important work she does to make us feel better when we are unwell. Our other visitor told us all about her job at the hospital, we especially loved the video of the emergency helicopter landing!

Our Spring 2 topic was ‘Once Upon a Time’ where we focused on a different traditional tale each week. We started our topic by reading the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. We enjoyed listening to this story, answering questions and joining in with the ‘fee fi fo fum’ chant! During our busy time, we were busy using our hands to mix blue and yellow paint together to make the colour green which we then hand printed onto our very own beanstalks, they look great! We were so excited to plant our very own beanstalks. We spent time talking about how we can care for our beanstalks to make sure they grow big and strong (just like us!) We also read the story of The 3 Little Pigs and retold this during our play. We were busy building our own houses out of straw, sticks and bricks and testing them out together to see which one is the strongest. We also created our own paper plate pigs and drew maps to help Mummy pig find her way to the 3 little pigs houses. We have also read Goldilocks and the 3 Bears, The 3 Billy Goats Gruff and Little Red Riding Hood!

This half term we have also enjoyed lots of additional enrichment activities such as National Storytelling week, Children’s Mental Health week, World Book Day and STEM Week. During National Storytelling week our focus story was The Gingerbread Man. We used our five senses to explore a gingerbread man biscuit (our favourite part was eating it, yum!) During our busy time we had fun creating our own gingerbread characters as well as using our maths skills to match the correct amount of pegs to the numeral on the gingerbread man. We loved drawing giant gingerbread men on the big paper and working together to decorate them. As part of Children’s Mental Health Week, we spent time talking and thinking all about our feelings. We practised recognising feelings by looking at different facial expressions and sharing times that we have felt different emotions and why we felt that way. The children enjoyed watching video clips from the film ‘Inside Out’ – they especially liked the ‘guess the feelings’ game that we played. Throughout the week we read both ‘The Colour Monster’ and ‘The Crayons Book of Feelings’ and spent time discussing the different colours and emotions from both books. During busy time, the children enjoyed completing a feelings sorting activity where they had to recognise the sad, happy and angry pictures and sort them to the correct emotion.

In Maths this term we have been singing a range of number rhymes as well as practising our number recognition to 5. We have also spent lots of time practising our counting skills and completed activities where we had to match the amount of toys to the correct numeral. We have been learning all about how to compare amounts using the words ‘more than’ and ‘less/fewer than’ as well as developing our understanding of positional language. We have spent time reviewing our knowledge of 2D shapes by naming and describing their properties. In the Maths area, we loved tracing round the 2D shapes to see what pictures we could create. We then moved onto learning about 3D shapes which we have learnt is a shape that has three dimensions and is not flat.