Welcome to our Rising 3’s who have joined us this half term! The children have settled in beautifully and look very smart in their new Crescent uniforms! Both our Nursery and Rising 3’s classes have been engrossed in their topic of Peppa Pig’s Adventures. To introduce our new topic we began by sharing the story ‘Peppa at the Farm’ and introduced ‘Old Macdonald had a Farm’ as our rhyme time focus. It was great to see so many children following the rhyme map and using actions to recite the rhyme!
Our role plays transformed into a farm shop, George Pig’s Dinosaur Park and a house for children take on roles such as a customer, shop keeper or farmer. The children handled real food items and used their new vocabulary to describe what they could see and feel. Through our next adventure story ‘Let’s go shopping Peppa’, the children did some amazing writing creating their own shopping lists and recognising familiar logo’s. We have also introduced ‘Squiggle whilst you wiggle’ this half term. We carry this out daily to develop gross motor skills, understanding of language and fine motor skills to enable our children to become confident in their early writing.
In phonics we have continued to embed our listening skills, distinguishing between different sounds and we have continued to introduce the children to the set 1 sounds. The children are now beginning to hear some initial sounds of words and to write some recognisable letters.
In Maths we have compared the weight of objects and explored mathematical vocabulary such as ‘heavy, light, big, small, heavier, lighter, heaviest and lightest’. The children applied this new found knowledge within their role play where they used the balancing scales to see which food item from our farm shop was the heaviest! All of our children now have access to Ten Town at home , this has been really successful in school and this half term we have continued to introduce more of the characters to support with recognising numbers, counting skills and number formation. We have looked at pattern- continuing and creating our own patterns – this has been done through use of real objects, pictures and body percussion.
In our topic work we have been very busy exploring our immediate and local environments. Nursery children enjoyed a trip to Longton Park where they enjoyed learning about the season of Winter. We wrapped up in warm clothing, made birdfeeders to hang up for the birds to help them find food during the colder weather, we took care of the environment through litter picking and even spotted dome bushy tailed squirrels!
We have shown off our creativity expressing ourselves through painting, songs, dance and rhymes. We looked at different ways of attaching media creating or own self-portraits. We collaged tractors and farm animals using different textures and experimented with combining different materials such as wool, sawdust and paint.
We have been busy discussing how we have grown and changed over time. We shared our baby photo’s and talked about how other things grow such as plants and food. In R.E we listened to the story of ‘The Farmer’s seed’. We grew our own cress seeds and captured the changes through taking daily photo’s.
We loved joining in with the Chinese New Year celebrations where we made our own lanterns and tried out using chopsticks! We had fun playing and exploring in the coloured rice and tasting different foods!
We also started our swimming lessons this half term. Our Nursery children were very brave to try something new and the children had a great time splashing, swimming and learning how to stay safe in the water. A big well done to everyone!