Early Years 2018-19
Maple and Rowan classes
Here is our curriculum map so you can see what we are learning this year.
Autumn 1
Topic: Do you want to be friends?
Sparkling Start: Tour of the school.
We have been settling in very well into school. We have been busy getting to know our new teachers and friends and exploring the indoor and outdoor learning environments. We went on a tour of the school as our 'Sparkling Start'. This included visiting the computer suite, the big playground, the sensory garden and the forest. Now we have been at school for a little while we are becoming much more confident to talk to new people and ask for help if needed.
The grown ups have been working hard to find out what things we already know and what they need to teach us next. We have tried to write our names and practise recognising letter names and sounds. We have also been showing them our counting skills and number recognition. We have started working with grown ups in small groups so that we can practise our next steps. Lots of us have already made a good start with our home learning and have been practising our reading and sight words.
Lots of our learning this term has been focussed on recognising our emotions and making friendships. We learnt about the 'Elmer' story to help with our discussions about differences and the importance of celebrating what makes us unique. We have also been learning the 'Colour Me Happy' story to help us talk about our feelings and understanding that we can use different strategies to handle our emotions.
Autumn 2
Topic: Will you read me a story?
Fab Finish: Fairytale Party
This term we are learning about lots of different stories, the stories include the traditional tales of 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears' and 'The Gingerbread Man'. We are also reading books written by the Ahlbergs, these books include 'The Jolly Postman' and 'The Jolly Christmas Postman'. As we read the stories we are learning different actions to help up remember them, we are then using these actions to retell the stories to one another. We have been using the characters from the stories to help us in our maths learning, such as sharing, using money, counting, and weighing ingredients when making our own gingerbread men.
This term we have been learning the importance of 'Remembrance Day' and the meaning behind it, we all painted a poppy stone and placed them in our own 'Remembrance Garden'. We were set the homework project of creating our own poppy at home, they all look amazing as we have been very creative! We have been exploring our school library where we have been looking at the different books and stories with our friends. We have been using our learning from our topic to help us with our writing, we have been practising to write CVC words and even some sentences when writing our letters to Father Christmas!
We are now very busy learning about the Christmas Story and getting ready for our Christmas Performance, we have been learning lots of different Christmas songs to sing to our family and friends! We have all been lucky enough to have had a visit from the Pantomime cast, which included Peter Pan, Tinkerbell and even Captain Hook! After the cast visited our school we went to watch the Pantomime of Peter Pan, we all really enjoyed it and enjoyed cheering and singing along! This term our 'Fab Finish' is a fairytale party, we are dressing up as fairytale characters and exploring different activities with our adults that focus on reading!
Spring 1
Topic: What happens when I fall asleep?
Sparkling start: Night time experience during the day!
This term we started off our topic of ‘What happens when I fall asleep?’ by creating a night time experience during the day for our sparkling start. We created a cinema in our school hall where we enjoyed the delicious treats of popcorn and a slushy to drink. We began the new year by discussing our wishes for the future and wrote them down along with a photo of ourselves to create our new year wish posters. We used our phonics skills to help us write the sounds in the words and our creative skills to make our posters. We continued our night time theme by learning about space where we enjoyed exploring our own space station in our outside role play area and by learning about the difference between nocturnal and diurnal animals. We all really enjoyed going to our Valentines disco where we showed off our amazing dancing skills and played a variety of fun and exciting games!
In our forest school sessions this term we have been using our detective and observational skills to search for the different wildlife and plants we can see. We worked together to find as many birds as we could after creating our own bird feeders out of pipe cleaners and cheerios. To spot the different birds we used binoculars so we could closely look at their different features such as their colours and sizes. We have been learning about Shrove Tuesday where we attended a special assembly all about it, we then continued to learn and celebrate Shrove Tuesday in our forest by cooking and eating our own delicious pancakes!
In P.E this term we have been developing our throwing and aiming skills by working in teams to try and throw different objects into hoops, we had to carefully look at the target and use our arms and hands to judge how far to throw our objects. We continued to develop our throwing and aiming skills by playing a variety of outside games, this included trying to throw a ball to our partner with someone else trying to intercept the ball in between us. We have been very creative this half term by creating our own stencil pictures by using different stencils, sponges and paint. In Maths we have been looking at repeating patterns and had a go at creating our own patterns, we have also continued to develop our shape knowledge by describing the properties of both 2D and 3D shapes.
Spring 2
Topic: Why do ladybirds have spots?
Fab Finish: Easter crafts at Family Fun Time!
We started the term by celebrating World Book Day where we all dressed up as our favourite character from a book, we all looked amazing in our outfits and proudly showed the rest of the school our characters in our World Book Day assembly. We then completed our own book reviews and spoke about what we like from our favourite books and why we chose the character we did to dress up as. To continue celebrating World Book Day we went on a school trip to Clacton Library and the Princes Theatre. At the theatre we were treated to a visit on stage where we were shown how all the lights work and the special effects, we all had a go at using the microphones and explored how the smoke machine worked! At the library we were very lucky and had a story read to us followed by a variety of activities where we could make up our own stories and help to create and decorate one of the library displays. Some of us even had a go at taking out own book to take home using the library machine.
In maths we have been learning about addition and subtraction, we have been exploring a variety of methods to solve addition and subtraction number problems. We have been solving addition number problems by using playing cards, counting cubes and by counting and adding different pictures of minibeasts. To help us solve subtraction number problems we have been using the interactive whiteboard, Numicon and by writing the number sentences for ourselves on whiteboards. In English we have been exploring stories about minibeast, these include 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' and 'The Bad Tempered Ladybird', to help us remember the stories we learnt different actions and created story maps of the key events in each story. We continued our learning by retelling the stories to one another and by writing our sentences about the characters in the books.
To celebrate it nearly being Easter we had our 'Fab Finish' of creating Easter crafts with our grownups at Family Fun Time. We all had an Easter sewing kit which we used to create our own Easter hanging decoration, we carefully followed the instructions of sewing the edges of an Easter egg and then stuffed and decorated the egg with our grownups helping us when needed. We also had the opportunity to create our own Easter cards for our loved ones, we used an egg template and then used our creative skills to decorate the eggs and our phonics knowledge to write the inside of the cards.
Summer 1
Topic: Do cows drink milk?
Sparkling Start: Hatching ducklings
We were very excited when we came back to school after the Easter holidays to learn we had some duckling eggs in an incubator! We spent lots of time learning about how to look after the eggs and made posters for visitors to look at. Once the ducklings had hatched we enjoyed spending time watching, holding and bathing them! We also enjoyed showing our parents how they were growing and changing as they dropped us off each morning. We were sad to say goodbye but understood that they had to go and live outside now so they have more space.
Once we had learnt lots of information about plants, animals and life cycles we went on a trip to Hasty's Farm to celebrate all of our learning. Throughout the day we learnt about farm animals and spent time grooming, feeding and patting them. We also took part in workshops linked to stories we had learnt about, 'The Hungry Caterpillar' and 'The Minibeast Bop'. We tasted different fruits and were able to build our own bug hotels. We were very good at listening to instructions out of school and had a lovely, fun day.
Summer 2
Topic: Who lives in a rock pool?
Fab Finish: Fun in the Sun Day/ Family Fun Time
We began the term with learning about rhyme through the story, 'Pirates Love Underpants'. We have studied lots of high quality texts in English this term, to help us develop our writing skills. These include, 'Tiddler', 'Sharing a Shell' and 'The Snail and the Whale'. In maths we have been practising our problem solving skills and reminding ourselves how to add, subtract, double and halve.
We have focused on healthy lifestyles this term. We took part in a whole school 'Race for Life', to raise money for Cancer Research. We have also participated in Sports Day and Water Safety Week, to help us understand about healthy bodies, minds and lifestyles.
Throughout the term we have been growing some of our own food that we will share with our parents, during our last 'Family Fun Time' session. We have grown potatoes, chives, radishes, courgettes, beetroot and some fruit to make our own homecooked meal. This is part of the 'Grow to Eat' project, which is a 7 before 7 initiative.
During our time in EYFS we have learnt and grown so much! We have worked hard to achieve our next steps and develop our learning dispositions, ready to begin our time in year one. It has been a busy, but very successful, year!
