This unit of work will widen pupils' awareness as a building block from the Autumn term focusing on their locality and homes. Pupils will explore living and non-living things and understand that living things grow including babies, plants and seeds. Pupils will gain an awareness of living things such as plants, insects, and trees. Teaching will allow pupils to explore habitats and ecosystems and draw children’s attention to their environment, recognising how they can care for it and comparing their environment with other local places. Additionally, pupils will learn how forces work through push, pull, floating, and sinking experiments.
Nursery Class Teacher - Mrs Evans
Learning Support Officers - Mrs Sara Baldwin, Mrs Sarah Perry, Mrs Jane Lewis, Mrs Hannah Harbison Evans, Mrs Rebecca Woszczycki, Mrs Maxine Pooley, Mrs Charlotte Bowden
School Values for the Term
January - Determination and Perseverance
February - Honesty and Trust
March - Learning and Effort
Language, Literacy and Communication
This term children will continue to learn their sounds, we will begin to practice letter formation and writing our names, working hard to perfect our pencil grips.
More information about the phonics programme that we use in school can be found at www.ruthmiskin.com/parents.
Throughout the day, the children are encouraged to use incidental Welsh such as 'diolch', 'bore da' and 'hwyl fawr'. During our Helpwr Heddiw sessions, we have been learning colours, songs, counting and basic commands such as sit down, stand up, listen and ready.
We look forward to celebrating St David's Day on March 3rd and completing lots of fun activities during Welsh Week. The children will be able to wear House Colours or Welsh Costumes to join in the celebrations.
Mathematics and Numeracy
Mathematics and Numeracy form part of our daily routine. The children are exposed to numbers throughout the day through counting, rhymes and focused activities, and we enjoy practising counting forward and backward. Nursery children work hard to build firm foundations with numbers 1 to 10 and above. The children are encouraged to deepen their understanding of numbers by extending their mathematical vocabulary. All children have the opportunity to talk about maths through numbers, and we would encourage parents to speak about numbers in children's everyday activities.
This term, we will continue to use 'numicon' to help us with our counting and sequencing. We will be using butterflies to introduce symmetry. We will investigate length, capacity, mass, sinking and floating. We also sequence longest to shortest, largest to smallest and begin to understand the concepts of one more or one less.
The children will be encouraged to make marks to form numbers.
Health and Wellbeing
Health and Well-being are critical for Nursery children, as this is a foundational period for their physical, emotional, social and cognitive development. We will continue to provide daily opportunities for the children to develop their gross and fine motor skills.
We will use our outdoor environment to enhance physical health and an appreciation of nature. We will encourage curiosity through exploratory play and hands-on activities and provide opportunities for creative expression through art, music, and imaginative play.
Children will be encouraged to express their feelings, begin to learn how to manage their emotions through activities such as storytelling or role-play and build resilience through problem-solving activities.
We will learn about the importance of healthy eating and washing hands.
Other Areas of Learning and Experience
Our unit title for this term is ‘Our Wonderful World’. During our other areas of learning experiences, we will begin to learn about living and non-living things. Children will go on a walk around the school to explore what is living and what is non-living. The children will gain an awareness of groups of living things, for example, plants, insects and trees. We will plant seeds and watch them grow. The children will have the opportunity to explore habitats and think about our environment and how we can care for it.
Children will look at images of themselves as babies and toddlers and observe and discuss how they have changed. Children will then match animals to their infants and notice how they change and grow. Children will begin to explore non-living things and how forces work to create push, pull, floating and sinking.
We will also explore how forces work through hands-on experiments. We will investigate push and pull, floating and sinking.
We will learn songs, paint pictures, create junk models and predict if they sink or float.
Things to remember
Please ensure that all of your child's personal effects are labelled; this includes water bottles, fruit pots, jumpers and coats.
Please ensure that water bottles contain water, not squash or fruit juice. During the afternoon session, we have our fruit snacks; please could we ask that only fruit or vegetables be provided? Grapes should be cut and not kept whole.
If you are not personally collecting your child at the end of the school day, please inform the Nursery staff who will collect them.
We have several children in school with a nut allergy. We strive to be a nut-free school, so please do not send in nut products in packed lunches such as nutella.
Could the children please wear PE kits to school every Thursday.
Many thanks
The Nursery Team.
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