EYFS

The preschoolers have been learning about the topic of dinosaurs. The children have been fantastic at pronouncing different dinosaur names and engaging in small world play with the dinosaur toys. The children enjoyed a dinosaur dig with skeletons and made their own skeletons with cotton buds. 

For Valentine’s Day the children had fun decorating biscuits and creating handprint flowers; we had lots of conversations in feeling warm, happy and loved.

The language in the preschool has been amazing with our farm yard puppets. The children love singing Old MacDonald Had a Farm and completing farmyard puzzles. 

The children loved our recent visit from two police officers who were kind enough to show the children around their police van. The other visitors were the chicks who the children enjoyed stroking and caring for. 

Chinese New Year -  After celebrating our New Year we then said ‘"gong hei fat choy" or "xin nian kuai le" (’ during the weeks of 29th Jan - 12th Feb.  Celebrating the Chinese New Year  in style with a ‘home made / children made’ vegetable and noodle dish. Some of us were brave enough to use chopsticks.

Handa's Surprise - Let’s meet Handa in a story called Handa’s Surprise.  She collects delicious fruits for her friend Akeyo. When she arrives at Akeyo's village, they are both surprised to find different fruits in the gift basket. They meet animals on the way who steal the fruit, but a goat butts the tangerine tree just in time and replenishes the lost goodies. Here we are acting out the story and sampling the delicious fruits Handa had in her basket.  Some fruits we’d never tried like the passionfruit.

What fun having real chicks at school, their feet were tickly on our hands and they made cute cheeping sounds.

This month in reception we have been very busy. In Maths we have been learning about Symmetry and different ways of making a symmetrical pattern. We have also been learning about partitioning the number 2 and went shopping at the local greengrocer to buy ‘2’ of different items. In literacy we have been looking at fairy tales from around the world, we learned about growing vegetables, which we will be doing ourselves in the summer term and designed our own fruit and vegetable farms complete with farm animals and sheepdogs.   For our story about the gigantic turnip we had a vegetable tasting session. We especially enjoyed the broccoli and found the radish to be a bit too spicy!. We also cooked and mashed some of our vegetables to see what changes occur as well as develop our fine motor skills. 

We celebrated pancake day too. Some of us made pancakes and we enjoyed eating them with lemon and syrup. In preparation for our ‘change and adapt’ science week we have been trying out lots of STEM experiments including; different ways to melt ice, colour mixing, what vegetables look like on the inside and growing our own watercress. We even recycled our unused vegetables to feed the soil in our outdoor garden planter. We are also starting to learn about animals and their adaptations and have created our own hybrid animals with special features using junk modelling.