EYFS Community Meeting

Our postcard winners this week…Some amazing examples of being kind, working hard and getting smart.

Well done to everybody – you are all amazing.

EYFS Community Meeting

Well done to all of our postcard winners today…..we had lots to share and celebrate!! We heard some lovely examples of children leading their own learning, being creative, doing teamwork and persevering with tasks. Another fabulous week in our Nursery and Reception classes.

EYFS Community Meeting

Here are our HoWLs stars of the week from Nursery and Reception. It was so lovely to hear how hard the youngest children in our school are working. We heard about some amazing acts of kindness and great examples of hard work and teamwork. Well done to all of our postcard winners today.

Friendship blocks

This mornings Crews in Nursery were spent thinking about the building blocks of friendship and being kind. Each crew member were given a block or brick and encouraged to think about what would a kind friend do to help make their friends happy? How can we play nicely together? How can we make sure everyone feels included? How we can manage our feelings if our friends don’t want to play at that moment?

Some of the thoughts that the children offered were; “Be kind”, “Share toys or food?”, “Ask someone to play with you too”, “Give them a cuddle or a kiss”, “Be nice”, “Sharing”, “Ask them to play” and “Play with someone else”. Good thinking Nursery, we’re all friends in Nursery.

Run, Run as Fast as you can….

This week Nursery have began case study two of our expedition “ Who is hiding in the pages of this book?” We have been immersed in our new text The Gingerbread Man. To hook the children into their learning they were detectives on a hunt for character body parts in our outdoor area. When they found all of the characters parts the children put them back together again revealing what our key text of the week would be. They were very excited for it to be The Gingerbread Man!

We modelled role play of the Baker and the Gingerbread Man to the children. The Gingerbread Man was apologising for running away and asked if he could help to make more Gingerbread to show how sorry he was. But how would he do this? The children hot seated the Baker and were encouraged to think about the ingredients that the Gingerbread Man may need. The Baker explained that they would need follow a recipe and a method, showing this to the children.

The children have had lots of fun role playing with the masks themselves in provision.

We then of course baked Gingerbread Men, following the Bakers recipe and instructions. The children were encouraged to think about first, next and then sequencing whilst they were baking. They also learned about different forces which they were using to make the gingerbread men as they mixed, rolled and pulled the rolling pin through the dough or pressed their Gingerbread Man shapes out with the cutter. These are pushes and pulls!

Luckily none of our gingerbread men tried to make a run for it! Great work Nursery.

Who’s that Trip, trapping over my bridge?

Last week Nursery continued to be geographers as they explored the final part of our first case study “Where in the world will this story take us?” The children explored rivers, comparing our local river in Norton; the River Went to the River Congo in Africa.

To hook the children into their learning and help them explore their local area they observed the “Adventures of our Everywhere Bear”, as he sent them a special dojo message with photos of his trek to the River Went, through the magical forest. They loved to see their special class mascot out on his own adventuring and exploring around our village. Many of the children recognising key landmarks on his journey.

The Everywhere Bears adventures led us to our key text of The Three Billy Goats Gruff as we immersed ourselves into the story, due to it being set over a river. The children enjoyed learning about the characters in the story and identified that the Big Billy Goat Gruff was a hero and the wicked troll a villain. They were delighted when the troll was tossed into the river! Here are a few of our representations of the Troll and the Billy Goats Gruff from our maths learning this week focusing on triangles and rectangles.

This got us thinking about how deep the river might be? We then compared the River Went to a much deeper and wider river – the River Congo. The children took a gallery walk of photos of the river, noting differences and similarities between the Congo and the River Went.

We then boarded our imaginary canoes in groups of three, dressed with our binoculars and went on a virtual tour of the River Congo. Thinking about and imagining what we would be able to see, hear, smell and feel. We were very surprised when we were chased by crocodiles and sea snakes! We had to paddle fast! It was very scary and exciting. Not something you’d usually see or encounter at the River Went, thankfully.

The children had so much fun and used the imaginary experience to talk about what they may sense by a river. Beautiful work Nursery and something which you may get to experience for real sooner than you know as part of our fieldwork – shhh!!

A super week of learning in EYFS

Wow……Nursery and Reception had so many postcard winners in our community meeting this week. Lots of kindness being shown by the youngest children in our school and some great examples of working hard and getting smart. Keep up the super work everyone.

Mindful Monday

Today in our “Mindful Monday” Crew the children checked in with their zones of regulation to see how everyone was feeling, using our monsters to identify and name their emotions. We then took turns with a partner to draw something which happened during their weekend on whiteboards. I was amazed by some of the beautiful drawings in our crew circles, with the majority of children now using lines and circles with a clearer vision of their representations.

The children then took turns to talk about what they had been doing during the weekend with their partner and then recall this to other Crew members. The drawings really helped to bring their recounts to life and both Crews were very respectful of each other whilst they shared their stories. Well Done Crew Winkley and Crew Mortimer!

Castles fit for a future Princess.

Thinking back to last week as we continue with our current case study; “Where in the world will this story take you?” The week began with a visit from a special owl, who dropped by with some postcard clues, which had photos of various castles and palaces from around the world on the front, where our mystery key character “C” may have visited? This helped to hook the children in to our next text Cinderella.

To excite and engage the children further they created beautiful crowns using creative materials during our “Tranquil Tuesday” Crew and off we went on an adventure to a castle to enjoy and immerse ourselves in our new key text, it was very exciting!

The children carefully observed the illustrations in the story and other texts about castles and used the inspiration to shape another piece of beautiful artwork for our final product. They also drew their own castles outdoors in their play and experimented with fairytale castle themed stampers indoors in our painting provision.

In our Maths learning the children explored 2d shapes, thinking about how they look and using words to describe their shape and properties during a dice game. I modelled to the children how they could use the shapes to build/ create a castle. Some of the children copied the examples or my model but most created the most beautiful 2d shape castles and named the shapes they had used, thinking about why they would be useful for certain parts of the building. Here are some examples; “The drawbridge is a rectangle because it’s long and can go up and down” or “These are my pointy roofs, they’re three triangles” and “My windows are circles”. Just look at some of our beautiful work.

EYFS Community Meeting

We had a super start to our day celebrating with our Be Kind, Work Hard and Get Smart stars from Nursery and Reception this week. We heard some fabulous examples of children persevering with tasks and challenging themselves and each other. What a super week, well done to everyone in our Nursery and Reception classes.