Welcome to Acorn Class
Nursery Nurse: Miss Riley Teacher: Mrs Pierce (Friday)
Teaching Assistants: Miss Lawson-Webster & Miss Rehman
Transition
There will be a range of transition activities this half term for those children who are starting Reception class in September. More information to follow...
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.
Each half term we have a topic that we link our learning to and we plan some activities based around the knowledge and vocabulary that we want the children to learn. However, the topic is mainly used as a driver to plan an engaging environment and activities that are is tailored to meet individual needs and the next steps of our children.
Summer Term 2
This half term our overall topic is 'I Wonder...'. Within this topic our learning will be based around:
Disney Fairy Tales
We will be learning about the different types of characters in these stories - hero, villain, good/bad, retelling stories and acting them out and finally organising a ball for Prince Charming
Dinosaurs
We will be investigating fossils, digging for bones and comparing and sorting dinosaurs. We will be reading a range of non-fiction and fiction texts and developing our questioning skills to find things out.
Summer holidays/Seaside
Through a range of texts and videos we will be learning what the seaside looks like, things you can do there, and some of the animals you might see. We will be thinking about journeys, forms of transport and how we might get to the seaside. Finally, the children will be learning about the seasonal changes that occur in summer, what we might wear, what the weather is like and the foods we often eat.
We have lots of exciting learning and experiences planned for the children based around this theme.
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.
