Summer 1 – ‘Minibeast Adventures’
This half term our topic is ‘Minibeast Adventures ‘. Please take a look at our focus books and the fun activities we have planned. There are also some ideas for how you could extend our learning at home.
Topic web Minibeast adventures
We started this half term by reading ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’. We enjoyed re-telling the story using a story sack and had a fruit tasting day where we tasted all of the healthy foods from the book. We talked about which foods were healthy and which foods were unhealthy and why. After we voted for our favourite and counted the votes, strawberries had the most votes!
Our next focus book was ‘The Crunching Munching Caterpillar’ and had so much fun acting out the lifecycle of a butterfly. We used playdough to make beautiful butterflies and used paint to make symmetrical butterflies. We learned all about shape in Maths and went for a shape hunt, we did a wonderful job of finding circles, squares, triangles and rectangles in our classroom and outdoors.
After that we read the story ‘Superworm’. We loved this story and in Maths we used the language of length to describe Superworm and made our own long and short worms using playdough. We thought about what our own super power would be and made superhero masks and potions. We also went on a bug hunt and found some amazing minibeasts including spiders, beetles, woodlice and worms. We found out facts about them in our non-fiction books.
Our final minibeast book was ‘Tadpoles promise’. We learned all about the life cycle of a frog and practiced out jumping skills pretending to jump just like a frog. We also made frogspawn using chia seeds. We enjoyed talking about how they changed when we added water to them and described how they felt. Lots of us thought they were very slimy!
We finished off the half term by celebrating the Queens Jubilee and read the stories ‘Peppa’s Royal Party’ and ‘Mr Men and Little Miss The Royal Party’. We set up a Jubilee party in the home corner, made crowns, palaces out of sand and even cucumber sandwiches! We loved performing our ‘Superman’ song on the stage for all of the parents and carers on our Jubilee celebration day. We were also lucky enough to each get a special Jubilee teddy bear to keep to celebrate this special occasion.
Spring 2 – ”Food Glorious Food’
This half term our topic is ‘Food Glorious Food’. Please take a look at our focus books and the fun activities we have planned. There are also some ideas for how you could extend our learning at home.
Topic Web ideas for home food glorious food
In keeping with Pancake Day – what better way to support this glorious celebration than to share a wonderful story to help us understand the process of pancake making. We chose Mr Wolf’s Pancakes to help support our learning and what a super book it is. We were all engaged from the start and couldn’t believe the ending, we attempted to predict the story end but for many of us it was just too shocking to guess. But we really did enjoy the story and made many links to the familiar characters that kept popping up, some we had even learned about this year. We enjoyed making pancakes and even had a go at flipping them before adding favourite toppings and tasting them.
We celebrated World Book Day by dressing up as our very own favourite characters from a book, and our costumes certainly didn’t disappoint – the effort parents and carers went to really did impress us all.
We were fortunate enough to support Red Nose Day this year, we enjoyed this years theme and attempted to join in by creating funny faces and making people smile.
We even got to read about Goldilocks and The Three Bears whilst cooking up a porridge storm in the kitchen. We learned the Goldilocks song and enjoyed singing it on the way to the woods, whilst our porridge cooled down. We experimented with different flavours and toppings.
STEM week was a huge exciting success! The theme was growing and we engaged in a number of different experiments and observations, from planting seeds, growing our very own cress seed heads, to looking at and measuring our own growth.
We finished this half term with some celebrations including Mothers Day and Easter. We linked Mother’s Day to the story ‘Monkey Puzzle’ and we talked about what was special about our mothers and each planted a sunflower seed to take home and take care of. We made perfume outdoors with scented flowers and sweets indoors with chocolate scented playdough. We took part in many Eggcellent Easter activities including a very special Stay and Play session where adults and children were invited to join us for the session.
Spring 1 – ‘Who are the famous characters in my books?’
This half term our topic is ‘Who are the Famous Characters in my books?’. Please take a look at our focus books and the fun activities we have planned. There are also some ideas for how you could extend our learning at home.
We started this half term and topic in the best possible way… In our Pyjamas armed with our favourite book and snuggling in with hot chocolate while we fully embraced and enjoyed sharing stories. Such a perfect start to our new topic ‘Who are the famous Characters in my book?’. We shared our favourite stories and favourite characters with our friends and were really surprised to see others liked the same characters and some children brought books we had never heard of.
Santa left us a very special letter asking for our help, he needed to find a naughty elf called tinsel who had taken some presents that didn’t belong to him. We made wanted posters using the description Santa had given us in the letter and stuck them up around school so that everyone could help us find him. I’m sure you will agree tge posters are super clear and super detailed. It wasn’t long before the elf had been spotted. Our first focus story brought about a huge amount of excitement and need for investigatory skills, and soon an unexplained sack of presents had been left with a sorry note from Tinsel the elf. Now we needed to work out who the presents belonged to. We soon found ourselves on an ‘Elf Chase’ in the woods and even used this story to develop our mathematical vocabulary and positional language. We used the map to work out who the presents belonged to and re-wrapped them ready for delivery with the addition of new address labels so they wouldn’t go missing.
We also enjoyed learning about the Gruffalo, we made our very own deep dark wood café which served owl ice-cream, scrambled snake and roasted fox. We went on a Gruffalo hunt in the deep dark woods and found characters from the story during our walk. We came back and recreated the story using masks and made playdough Gruffalo’s in the malleable area.
We thoroughly enjoyed celebrating Chinese New Year by reading the Great Race and learning about the Chinese zodiac, we even got to taste some delicious Chinese food and take part in a Dragon Dance.
We celebrated Valentines Day and read one of our class favourites ‘Guess How much I love you’, we all spoke about who we loved and what was special about them.
We finished the topic with work on Little Red Riding Hood. We heard Grandma wasn’t feeling very well and so made her some tasty treats in the form of muffins from our recipe books in class. We retold the story using small world characters and masks. We made Granny’s house using junk modelling.
We can’t believe how many stories we have managed to focus on this half term but it has been wonderful learning so much about the fantastic characters in our stories. We also managed to complete some work on Internet Safety Week, Children’s Mental Health Week and Well-being Day.
Autumn 2 – ‘Nursery Rhymes and Christmas!’
This half term our topic is Nursery Rhymes. Please take a look at our focus books and the fun activities we have planned. There are also some ideas for how you could extend our learning at home.
We have had a wonderful half term in Nursery. We started off this half term with a spooky Halloween fun day where we all dressed up and took part in lots of Halloween activities. We learned all about fire safety on Bonfire Night and made our own smores around the fire pit in forest schools. We have done lots of work on our favourite nursery rhymes which included Incy Wincy Spider, Humpty Dumpty, Twinkle Twinkle little star and Baa Baa Black Sheep and we also celebrated World Nursery Rhyme week by taking part in special nursery rhyme week activities. We finished off the half term with our wonderful Nativity and loved performing for all of our parents and carers. We wish you all a very Happy Christmas.
Autumn 1 – ‘Marvellous Me & Settling In’
This half term our topic is Marvellous me! We are looking forward to finding out all about you and the things and people that are important to you. Please take a look at our topic web and book focus which shows the books we will be focussing on and the activities that we have planned for this half term. The fridge words show some of the vocabulary we will be using and would be great to practice at home.
We have thoroughly enjoyed our first half term in Nursery and we have settled into our routines beautifully. We have enjoyed meeting our teachers and friends and exploring our classroom both indoors and outdoors. We have talked lots about our families and where we live and loved sharing photographs from home of all of the special people in our lives. We have drawn pictures of ourselves which look wonderful displayed on our classroom wall. We learned all about harvest and read the book ‘Olivers Vegetables’. We got a wonderful surprise when Oliver left us a basket full of vegetables to make vegetable soup. We enjoyed following the recipe, chopping up vegetables and tasting the soup. It was delicious! We also took part in Arts Week and learned all about the artist Antony Gormley. We recreated his piece ‘Field for the British Isles’ and each made our own clay figure using tools to add details such as eyes. We finished off half term sharing books about Black History Month and talked lots about celebrating our similarities and differences.
