English learning starts with our youngest children in the Nursery! EYFS provides the foundation skills required for our children to go on to be fantastic readers and independent writers. 

In Little Bears we do phonics every day. Phonics for us focuses on key speaking and listening skills. It is vital that our children build on strong auditory processing skills in order to be able to move on to learning the individual sounds needed to read and write. We play lots of games involving recognising initial sounds and using sentence stems to express our ideas. 

Expressing ourselves is key to Nursery life. Singing, dancing, and daily story times help us to develop communication skills, imagination and creativity. We enjoy this as a whole class, as well as in small groups or through 1-1 time with an adult. 

Mark making is also a huge joy in the Nursery, as our children discover the power of expressing themselves using a range of mediums. Initially we see squiggles and excited exploration of colour and line, and this then progresses to early letter formation and clearer drawings. The development of fine motor skills really helps with pencil grip and we see great changes in the children's hand strength during their time at Nursery.

English learning features daily in the Nursery, but it has been wonderful to fully celebrate our love of stories on World Book Day this module! We loved seeing the brilliant costumes our children came to school in, and exploring the different books these characters come from. We also really enjoyed looking at our focus page from 'The Mysteries of Harris Burdick'. We had some brilliant discussions around where the characters might be travelling to, and it linked perfectly with our Inquiry learning linked to journeys. We can't wait to tell you our ideas, and to show our fabulous artwork sail that we have created as a class!