Welcome to Acorn Class
Teacher: Mrs Pierce (Friday) Nursery Nurse: Miss Riley Teaching Assistant: Miss Lawson-Webster
Our Learning
In Nursery your child will learn through a combination of structured and free play. Activities may include playing in the sand, listening to stories, painting, drawing, building with construction blocks and making things with play dough, doing jigsaws and puzzles as well as singing songs. Your child will learn early literacy and maths skills and develop their social and communication skills. Our learning takes place both indoors and outdoors.
Autumn Term
This half term our topic is 'Let's Celebrate'. We will be learning about different cultural, religious and community events and learning to develop a positive attitude towards difference – between people, families and communities.
To support our learning on celebrations and celebrating differences, our focus stories this half term are:
We will also be investigating seasonal change using our local environment and the story:
We have lots of exciting learning and experiences planned for the children based around these themes.
We will share these with you on this webpage and also on Tapestry.
Independence Skills
The children in Nursery are working hard to develop their independence skills; such as putting on and taking off their own coats and shoes. We hope parents and carers will continue to help by giving children lots of opportunities to practise at home and encourage children to tidy away their things when they have finished playing with them.
Mark Making
Children in Nursery practice mark making and writing their names daily in preparation for Reception. We begin to do this by encouraging mark making on a large and small scale, using scissors and manipulating materials and media such as stickers and threading beads. The outdoor area is also used to work on a larger scale and to develop core muscles that are essential for handwriting. We then look and talk about the shapes in our letters, feeling the movements that are made when writing, tracing shapes and beginning to form letters.
As children begin to write their names we explore and discuss the sounds in their own name.
Pencil Grip
To support name writing we encourage children to use a tripod grip. This will become natural over time as your child develops muscle strength to support this grip. We develop motor strength by molding playdough, painting, using tweasers, scissors and other hand held tools and threading. To hold the pencil we use our thumb and forefinger like a crocodiles mouth, the crocodile doesn't like the taste of the pencil so he scrunches up his face, when we bend our fingers the pencil will be in the correct position for writing, leaning on the middle finger for support. Mark making is part of our everyday practise and made purposeful in our play.
