Spring

Special Events:

We hold a Teddy Bears Picnic, dress up in pyjamas and onesies and invite our teddies from home to join us. But before we enjoy our food, we go on a bear hunt to look for the friendly bear.

Special Events:

At the end of the out topic we hold a Safari Day when the children can come to school dressed up as an explorer. We cross treacherous bridges, wade through rivers and climb trees to search for animals before relaxing with our homemade jungle smoothie.

In St Nicholas we put a great deal of emphasis on learning through play. This gives the children the opportunity to play in a group, keep play going by responding to what others are saying or doing. The play situation allows development of friendly behaviour. It allows for sharing and turn taking. Adult modelling is key in showing how to initiate conversations and recognising and celebrating when friends make good choices.

The children are encouraged to select and use a variety of resources independently. During tidy up time the children love the responsibility in taking ownership in making our class all clean and tidy.

Expressing how we feel is developed through circle time, playing with puppets and in recognising good and bad choices. Our belief is that if we make our friends sad we need to think about it and then try and make it better.

We continue to focus on the development of both fine and gross motor physical skills throughout nursery. In their outside play the children are given plenty of opportunities to balance, ride, climb and develop ball skills. In our continuous provision we aim to develop muscle strength through mark making, painting, sweeping and constructing with the large blocks. Modelling correct pincer grip and holding scissors are developed in all areas of nursery.

Our theatre area, singing/dancing and easy access to musical instruments allows the children to explore sequences and patterns of movement related to music and rhythm.

We explore moving in different ways, this is especially fun when we pretend to be different animals during our jungle theme.

The children use a range of tools and learn that some need to be handled safely.

All of the children can usually put on their own coats by now and with support may even be doing their own zips.

Snack time is great for talking about healthy choices and the importance of drinking plenty of water and doing plenty of exercise.

From listening to stories like 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears' to role-playing having a tea party with a tiger or helping a lion that has lost it's roar we are able to model, develop and extend the child's language and vocabulary.

We encourage the children to join with songs, rhymes and stories. 'Dear Zoo' is an excellent book which has a lot of repetitive phrases in that the children pick up quickly and enjoy repeating.

The children also gain practise in anticipating key events in a story. In the book, 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt', the children love to guess what terrain the family will face on the next page. The children even have a go at predicting what might happen at the end and sometimes make up their own alternative endings.

Through exploring and talking about the objects they find in a story sack, the children learn to structure more complex sentences and recall simple events in the correct order.

Playing games such as 'Hunt the Hippo' the children learn to understand and use simple prepositions such as ‘under’, ‘on top’, ‘behind’ and 'next to.'

We continue to encourage the children to look at books independently in the book corner by maintaining a few firm favourites while refreshing the shelves with the addition of some new books according to our theme.

We learn new rhymes and songs most of which are based around our theme and play with alliteration. The children love hearing and pointing out the alliteration when the 'slippery snake slithers and slides' in 'Rumble in the jungle'.

We continue to look at the way stories are structured through story maps and look at where the story is set, talk about what is happening and discuss the main characters.

In the spring term, the children continue to develop their early mark-making that has meaning and purpose for them. We provide a range of activities that motivate the children to engage in mark-making. For example, we write invitations to our teddies inviting them to school for a picnic.

The nursery is enriched with displays of letters and words enabling the children to copy from and if the children are ready, we teach the Read Write Inc. rhymes for letter formation.

Maths, number

We provide lots of experiences where children can use number in their play, "Here are three cars. I'm going to whizz them down the slope. Look how far they go." Singing number rhymes and songs are a daily occurence. We aim to develop their skills in fast recognition of amounts up to 3 [subitising], a dice is a great way to learn subitising.

The inside and outside area provide plenty of resources to represent numbers. The children may want to draw pictures or make mathematical marks on paper.

The environment is saturated with numbers that the children may want to copy or add trucks, dinosaurs to match the number.

How many jumps or claps can we do while our friend runs around the car track?

We have a large number of construction resources, whether they are large wooden bricks, duplo, stickle bricks and shapes. We enjoy listening to and supporting the children in telling us about what they have made or how they have arranged their construction using positional language, eg I have placed the smaller block on top, next to ...

The children can make patterns or arrangements using stones, cones and shapes. We may place a repeating pattern - stone, stick, stone stick ... but purposely make an error to see if the children can identify the mistake.

This term is perfect for talking about and identifying patterns. We draw clothes for the bears that have strippy, spotty, swirling patterns and of course there are plenty of patterns on the fur of jungle animals.

As well as a mud garden, we have a large outside area which allows us to observe plants and insects. We use ipads and become Spring detectives and take photos of signs of Spring looking at growth and changes in nature.

Role play areas are provided with a variety of resources that reflect the different communities and jobs that are in our world. Role play allows for children to talk about and replay everyday and special events that they have experienced.

The children develop their imagination, creativity and their ability to use media and materials themed around bears and animals that live in jungles and savannahs. They will increasingly develop their confidence in expressing ideas through drawing using continuous lines and beginning to use shapes to represent bears and jungle animals.

As well as the children learning some new animal themed songs, they may also make music for the giraffe in the book, 'Giraffes Can't Dance', 'When Goldilocks went to the house of the bears' or create a dance for Elmer the Elephant. The children are also provided with plenty of opportunities to play with colours and textures. They are given opportunities to join different materials and explore different textures as well as develop their own ideas when making and creating, eg when going on a bear hunt.

Following the children's interests, the role-play area is transformed into the bears' cottage, a jungle cafe or an animal rescue centre where the children further develop their imagination which often involves negotiating roles with others and creating their own props to help build their 'story'.

We begin the Spring term with our topic 'Celebrating'. The children discuss what things they like to Celebrate - Birthdays, Christmas, Baptism, New Year which leads us on to what the parish family celebrate. We will look at the story of the Presentation.

Next our topic is 'gathering', we will discover what activities the children and families like to do together and how we need the support and encouragement of others. This will lead us on to the Parish family gathering to listen to God's word.

Our final topic in Spring is 'Growing'- we spend time looking at a variety of things that will grow in spring time - bulbs, eggs, seeds. We will then introduce Lent as a time when we grow in love as Christians. The children will learn about Good Friday and Easter Sunday and that Easter Sunday is a happy day.