EYFS
Topic: All about me
Sparkling start: Tour of our new school
This half-term is our very first term of school and we have been very busy and excited settling in getting to know all of our new friends and all of the adults who work in our school. When we started school we spent the first few weeks showing the grown ups what we can do and what we enjoy doing, we also explored our new classrooms and our Early Years outside area. Our teachers have been been busy getting to know is where they have been working with us 1:1 to know all of our special personalities and attributes. Once we had settled into school we had our 'Sparkling start' which was a tour of our new school, we walked around the school in pairs where we visited all of the classrooms, the school forest, the school hall, the office and we went to see Miss Siggery and Maggie the dog in the Headteachers office. Our topic this half-term is called 'All about me' where we have been sharing with our friends what we enjoy doing, who lives in our house, who is in our family and what our favourite toys are. We have been doing this through our 'Jigsaw' sessions where we have been taking it in turns to speak whilst holding 'Jigsaw Jenie'. We also created our own houses where we drew who lives in them and then we tried to name all of the shapes that made up our houses. We have been enjoying learning and writing about the stories of 'The Colour Monster', 'Super-duper You', 'King and King', 'Funny Bones', 'The Squirrels Who Squabbled', 'In Every House in Every Street' and 'You Choose'. These stories have helped us to settle into school where we have been discussing our personal feelings, drawing our self-portraits and learning about our new friends.
Topic: Through my eyes
Fabulous Finish: 10 Good Deeds in 10 Days
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: A special visit 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. We all got the opportunity to get creative and made our own junk modelling emergency vehicles, these included police cars, fire engines, life boats and ambulances. We went on a class trip to Clacton Library where we were able to explore the children's books and even get our own library card, we were able to choose a book of our choice and use the special machine to check our own book to take home with us to share with our grown-ups. This half-term we celebrated 'Chinese New Year', we started off by trying a selection of Chinese food where we really enjoyed the rice, noodles and crackers. 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.
