Burrsville Infant Academy

EYFS

See our curriculum map below to find out which exciting topics we will be learning about this year.

Topic: Through my eyes 

Fabulous Finish: Christmas craft themed family fun time 

This half term we have been exploring the topic of 'Through my eyes' where we have been discussing the different celebrations we have experienced with our family and friends. Each week our text in literacy was based on a different event or celebration, this included writing a birthday party and wedding invitation, designing a poster for a meteor shower, writing a recipe to make bread and writing a letter to Santa. We also learnt about the different special events of Diwali, Halloween, Bonfire Night, Remembrance Day, Hanukkah and Christmas. We enjoyed our 'Home Learning' challenge of creating our own Remembrance Day Poppy during half-term and showing our friends our creations. We excitedly made our own biscuits in our children's kitchen that were designed to be wedding favours, we also enjoyed decorating and eating them for our snack! We then used any left over biscuits to conduct our own science experiment, we place a biscuit in three different solutions which were water, salt and red coloured liquid. We made predictions of what we thought would happen to each biscuit after being placed in the solutions and then after observing them throughout the day we looked at the results to see if our predictions were correct. To celebrate Christmas we put on a Christmas performance where we sang a selection of traditional and new songs for our grownups to come and watch, we also took part in Christmas dinner day and the school trip to the pantomime. At the end of the half-term we invited our grownups in to celebrate our fabulous finish of have a Christmas craft themed family fun time which also had a reading focus. 

Topic: People who help us

Sparkling start: Being visited by the police 

This half term we have been exploring the topic of 'People who help us'. We started off our topic by having a very special visit by the police, we really enjoyed learning about the role of a police officer. We got to sit in the police car and explore their different uniform, equipment and even got to turn on their siren! Throughout this half-term we have been exploring the different professions of people who help us in our day to day lives. We learnt about the police, fire fighters, doctors, vets and dentists. We enjoyed sharing our ideas about what we already know about these everyday superheroes and then sharing our new knowledge with our friends. This half-term we celebrated 'Chinese New Year', we started off by trying a selection of Chinese food where we really enjoyed the rice and crackers. We then got creative and made our own Chinese lanterns using the colours of red, gold, silver, orange and yellow. We learnt that these are considered lucky colours in China. We then attended and took part in a Chinese dance workshop, we were able to explore and use the props of Chinese paper parasols and became part of a Chinese dragon. At the end of this half-term we took part in the NSPCC 'Number Day' where we dressed up for digits, we came to school wearing clothes with numbers on them and completed a variety of maths and number activities to help us practise and raise money for such a good cause. In the last week of term we invited our grown ups into school for another 'Family Fun Time' session where we focused on our phonics, we showed our grown ups how we use our 'Fred Fingers' to sound out words and how we use our phonics in our everyday writing. 

Topic: Down at the bottom of the garden

Fab finish: Easter craft family fun time and hatching ducklings

This half-term we have been exploring the topic of 'Down at the bottom of the garden' which has been focusing on different minibeasts, growing and changing. We started off by reading the stories of 'Jack and The Beanstalk' and 'The Enormous Turnip' where we learnt about what plants need to grow which allowed us to plant our own bean seeds and care for them. From this we then created our own bean lifecycles where we could confidently talk about the different stages from planting a bean to it growing its own bean pod. We enjoyed reading the book 'Farmyard Hullaballoo' where we spotted the different rhyming words and created our own farm animal rhyming poems. We had some very exciting guests arrive in class which were 6 white eggs, we enjoyed observing them hatch into 6 beautiful ducklings which were brown and yellow. We learnt to care for them and enjoyed watching them have their first swim and as we were very caring and gentle we were able to hold them. Whilst enjoying caring for the ducklings we created our own duck lifecycles and duckling observational drawings, where we looked at the ducklings in detail to include their features. To continue our theme of growing we also had the opportunity to care and observe 5 caterpillars change into butterflies by making their own cocoons right in front of our eyes. At the beginning of the half-term we welcomed in Mr Massey our skipping expert who spent the day teaching us how to correctly skip and how to use a skipping rope, we have continued to practise our skipping skills in our outside area. We went on our first year group trip to Clacton Library to learn about the services they provide and where we got our own library cards so we could check out a book to take home with us. We also completed a variety of minibeast themed activities around the library and even met a giant bee! After our library trip we then celebrated 'World Book Day' where we dressed up as our favourite book characters and shared different stories with one another. To end the half-term we had our fab finish of inviting our grown ups into school to complete different minibeast and Easter themed activities such as making our own book marks and hanging Easter decorations. 

Topic: We're on the move

Sparkling start: Trip to Hasty's Farm 

This half term we have been exploring the topic of 'We're on the move' and to begin our topic we went on a school trip to Hasty's Farm where we travelled on a bus and looked out for different vehicles during our journey. We were able to spot and see an aeroplane, a police car, an ambulance, a fire engine, a boat, a coach, a motorbike and a bicycle. Once we were at the farm we went on an animal meet and greet experience where we used our knowledge from our previous topic to help us when feeding and looking after the goats, chickens, alpacas, pigs and cows. We were even lucky enough to meet two calves which were only 1 week old! We enjoyed exploring the farms different activities, meeting and feeding all the animals and completing their caterpillar trail. We have enjoyed learning about different vehicles where we especially enjoyed reading the book 'I am Amelia Earhart' where we learnt lots of different facts including Amelia Earhart being the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. We also really enjoyed reading the story of 'The Naughty Bus' where we had our own naughty bus that we kept finding in different places in our inside and outside area. To continue our learning about different vehicles we all created our own vehicle out of junk modelling, we enjoyed getting creative where we made different types of vehicles such as planes, cars, boats, helicopters and buses. Each week our book of the week focused on a different mode of transport where we explored and looked at how that vehicle has changed from the past to the present day, we spotted and discussed how vehicles from the past were smaller, did not always have an engine, did not often have a roof and how they did not have a lot of colour on them. In maths this half-term we have been exploring 2D shapes, we have been decomposing tangrams to spot the different 2D shapes within them and then selected, rotated and manipulated 2D shapes to create our own tangrams. We were able to name the 2D shapes and have been beginning to describe the properties of 2D shapes using the terms sides and corners.  

Topic: Under the sea

Fab finish: Fun in the sun day

This half term we have been exploring the topic of ‘Under the sea’. We have enjoyed learning about a variety of different sea animals, the beach and how to keep safe in the sea and sun. To begin our topic, we enjoyed learning about different places that people might go on holiday. Some of our holiday ideas included, Spain, New York, mountains, forests and deserts. We spoke about the similarities and differences that these places might have. We then wrote our own postcards about where we had been on holiday. We also enjoyed creating our own beach collage pictures. We used sand on the bottom of our picture, tissue paper for the sea, shells and a button for the sun. We had to think about the correct colours to use in our collage to make sure that it would represent the correct colours for the beach. During this topic we also learnt about instruction writing and we wrote instructions for the pirates the find their treasure. In addition to this, we enjoyed reading the story, ‘Clean up!’, which taught us why it is so important to keep our beaches clean. We enjoyed sharing our ideas with our friends about what we are going to do to help look after our beautiful beaches.

In maths this half-term we have been learning to add and subtract numbers using a number line. We learn that you jump forwards when you add numbers and jump backwards when you subtract numbers. We also learnt to problem solve using our knowledge of weight and length.

This half-term we also enjoyed an amazing sports day. We took part in lots of different events with the school such as, hurdling, sack race, egg and spoon race and many more. We all tried our best and enjoyed our refreshing ice lollies at the end of the day.