Welcome to Nursery 
To see the curriculum map for the entire year click here
What we have been learning
Autumn Term 2 and Spring Term 1
Bears!
We have been learning about Bears since the start of our second Autumn term (31st October). There is a surprising amount of learning to be done surrounding every child’s favourite fluffy friend!
When focusing on “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” we explored comparing big, medium/middle and small; as you can see four of our children doing with the colourful compare bears. While two of the boys are show off their Daddy Bear head bands they cut out.
Later we thrived on the excitement and different sounds of a bear hunt and we took part in our own Teddy Bear’s picnic including making our sandwiches. In the photo below you can see one of our artists in the process of painting the river from the Bear Hunt story. We later used this and other paintings of the story to do our own bear hunt outside.
Books like the “This is the Bear” series are great for practicing our phonics because of the way they rhyme. One of the girls had done very well finishing many of the rhyming sentences for ”This is the Bear and the Scary Night” while reading it as a class.
Last week we were thinking about time and how it changes from night to day with our “Peace at Last” story. In this story Daddy Bear wasn’t able to sleep because of various noises and eventually it is morning and time to get up when he finally falls asleep. You can see one of the girls enjoying exploring how the clock works with the different numbers that she could identify.
Of course in between Bears we had to make time for learning about our other topics like Diwali and Bonfire Night/Guy Fawkes. As well as Christmas and the Nativity story which we performed in a play with Reception. One of the girls is showing off her Mehndi hand colouring page she did for Diwali. While one of her friends is colouring in an angel from our nativity story
and you can see one of our Christmas cards in the bottom picture.
Spring Term 2: Ground, Air and Water.
From the start of Spring term 2 (20th of February) we have been learning about ground, air and water through traditional stories. Our first week back we learnt about the Three Billy Goats Gruff story.
Two of the children are showing off their Billy goat and Troll masks. They were encouraged to do these as independently as possible.
You can see this as one of the girls focuses on cut out her own eye holes. The teacher has cut the start and then encouraged her to do the rest herself. The children also really enjoyed the climbing frame which had a small bridge to act out the story, complete with ‘trip-trap’ and troll voice sound effects.
In weeks 2 and 3 we have learnt about Jack and the Beanstalk. Including thinking about Compassion and how the Giant might have felt when Jack took his things, this was looked at through the story Jim and the Beanstalk.
As can be seen in the picture below-left the story lent itself to counting beans and this boy was even able to put the numbered beans in the correct order from 1 to 20. For a bigger group activity we also coloured in our own giant beanstalk and stuck on leaves and beans that we had painted as well as our coloured pictures.
Two of the boys showing off their Wanted posters for the giant from Jack and the beanstalk. The second picture shows how we water all our beans; which each child planted one of.
The topic for the following weeks 4 and 5 was the Three Little Pigs.
One of the girls is showing how she noticed that one of the three little pigs is a girl, as opposed to other versions we also looked at. In the second photo three of the boys look at a book each one of them is saying each word of the title while pointing at each word.
One of our girls counting the pigs all the way up to 30 as well as ordering them correctly!
In Week 5 and 6 we also learnt about Easter.
You can see one of the girls with her home made Easter bunny hat that she bought for hat day. Another shows how we used Easter egg halves in maths to match quantity and numerals.
However, also we spent a week looking at the traditional Easter story. These boys are working together to correctly order four pictures of some of the main points in the story.
On March the second we also had World book day celebrations where the children came dressed up as a book character they picked.
As you can see below the Gruffalo was a popular choice, as were Princesses like Cinderella and traditional characters like Little Red Riding Hood.
Summer Term 1: Ground, Air and Water continued.
From the 19th of April we started our first summer term and continued our topic of ground, air and water. We realised our plants had wilted over the break and began watering them again. We also started looking at mini-beasts through Eric Carle’s book The Very Hungry Caterpillar (weeks 2 and 3) and The Bad Tempered Ladybird (weeks 4 and 5).
As you can see in the photos below the books and wider topic lend themselves to caring for the environment by watering our plants which we have transferred to bigger containers.
The topic also lends itself to exploring our world by doing things like looking for mini-beasts in the garden. However, the mini-beasts in the right hand photo are of the electronic kind, but were still great fun to explore.
In the lower-left picture one of the boys in enjoying doing his fingerprint spots on his ladbird painting, we rolled a dice to count how many to do each time. While one of the other boys is proudly showing his writing one of the words for which is beetle.
