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EYFS – Julia Donaldson

Welcome to our Early Years Foundation Stage!

Our Reception Class Teacher is Ciara James.

Our Nursery Teacher is  Hannah Sesstein Hogg.

Our Lead Practitioner is Domenica Torrano and our Learning Support Assistants are Lisa Smith,  Chloe Joyce, Katrina Ratcliff and Shenay Kanogul.

EYFS Curriculum Leaflets

Please see our Curriculum Leaflets for this academic year. These Curriculum Leaflets aim to provide you with key information regarding your child’s learning and curriculum each half term.

 

EYFS Family Learning Projects

Please see the Family Learning Projects for your child in EYFS. There is a Family Learning Project per half term and they are linked to our learning adventures in class. See how many of the tasks you and your family can complete.

 

  • Chinese New Year

    The children really enjoyed learning about Chinese New Year.

  • Reception

    For our first week back, Reception learnt all about New Year’s. Over the week we discussed the traditions people take part in when celebrating the New Year such as counting down to 10 and making resolutions. The children also created beautiful firework posers using oil pastels, which they then enjoyed smudging to blend different colours.

    15th January- Penguins

    After a very frosty week the class decided to learn all about animals that live in cold places. We read the book “Cuddly Dudley” by Alborough Jez, which started an important discussion about personal space and boundaries. Over the week the class enjoyed making penguins out of potatoes, saving saved arctic animals from the ice, labelling penguins and even feed a hungry penguin different graphemes.

  • The Jolly Christmas Postman

    The children in Nursery were amazed this week to watch our home corner transform into a Christmas post office inspired by our story ‘The Jolly Christmas Postman.’ We talked a lot about the features in letter writing and what needs to go on the front of an envelope.
    The children were very excited to write their own letters either to Father Christmas or a character from the story. The children were so proud of their work and we were very proud to take the children for a local walk to the postbox to post our letters. The children listened to the adults beautifully and were a real credit to our school!
  • Art Focus Week

    Our budding artists in Nursery enjoyed our Art focus week as we studied the French artist Herve Tullet. We started our discussion on Monday by looking at famous paintings by different artists such as Monet and Van Gogh. They were very taken with the Mona Lisa and there were lots of interesting discussions about how she was feeling while she was having her portrait painted!

    The children were very excited to see the colourful work of Herve Tullet. They talked about all the different colours he used and the focus on dots and circles. They were so excited that they couldn’t wait and wanted to create their own pieces of inspired artwork using our felt tip pens.
    Continuing our artist focus, the children used a variety of different tools to create circles and dots on their paintings. When then created our own art gallery with their beautiful work!
    We also created our own contrast piece of artwork, we compared our colourful pieces of artwork with a monochrome design and then used white and black paper with black pens and chalk to create a piece of monochrome artwork. The children have been so proud of their work and are continuing to add to our art gallery around the classroom!
  • Autumn Celebrations

    Also this week, in Nursery we talked about the different celebrations during the autumn. On Halloween, we talked about the story ‘Room on the Broom.’ We gathered round to conduct our own little science experiment. We talked about what would happen if we mixed an acid (vinegar) with an alkali (bicarbonate of soda). They were amazed to see the chemical reaction. We talked about the different colours we could use and what ingredients we could put into our magic potions. The children really enjoyed filling and pouring from the different sized containers and investigating their capacity.

  • Autumn

    In Nursery this week, we have been talking about the seasons. We have focused our learning on the season of Autumn. We talked about how and why the leaves change colour and fall from the trees. We also learnt some new vocabulary including the words ‘migrate’ and ‘hibernate.’ The children have enjoyed carving out pumpkins, they really got their hands in – literally! They have also been role playing in the home corner making their own soups, so this week we extended their play by making our own pumpkin soup.
    We talked about what a recipe is and how we can follow the instructions to make our soup. The children carefully chopped up the pumpkin using knives. They really understood the need to use the tools carefully and managed well. After we cooked our soup, the nursery leader used the blender to blend it into a liquid, they found the noise very funny! We then sat around the table together to taste our delicious soup.
  • Colour Monster

    Our Nursery children explored their feelings with the colour monster today and had some lovely ways to talk about how they were feeling.

  • Recycling & Investigating

    Recycling Week in Nursery 

    For recycling week, the Nursery children learnt all about how to look after the planet. We discussed how we can recycle our rubbish in order to protect the habitat of the animals and sea creatures around us.

    “Picking some rubbish. We have to put it in the bin so the animals don’t get stuck in it”

    The children proudly helped to look after our school by conducting a litter pick on the field. This is an effective way to instil a sense of environmental responsibility from an early age.

    Eye Colour Investigation in Nursery 

    One of the children in Nursery initiated a conversation about eye colour, another child soon joined in and we had a big discussion comparing the different colours of our eyes. We recorded our findings on a tally chart.

    We extended this by investigating the colour of all the children’s eyes in the Nursery to find out what the most common eye colour was. The children asked each other what colour eyes they had and were able to talk about who had the same colour eyes and who had different. We recorded our findings on a Pictogram chart.