Early Years (Nursery & Reception) 2024-2025

Welcome to Early Years, Mrs Marsden is the class teacher, supported by Mrs Manners and Miss Forrest.
Mrs Chisholm covers PE and Mrs Athey covers RE in teachers planning, preparation and administration time.
 
Please see below for our long term plan for this year and our half termly topic letters alongside our timetable.
We had a great first week back, making new friends and getting used to new routines!
Please watch our video that shares our first forest school lesson of the academic year. We had great fun recapping and learning rules, bug collecting and playing with our friends.
Reception children have started their Read, write inc sessions and we have been busy practising letter formation, recognising initial sounds and beginning to blend CVC words too. 
In Maths our topic has been making a match and sorting. We have had fun doing lots of practical activities such as - pair games, finding a match and sorting monsters in different ways.
We have had fun problem solving while making water tracks with our friends and practising key fine motor skills when using tweezers and completing cutting skills tasks.
We were really lucky to look at a boys and a girls evacuee suitcase from the Bailiffgate Museum in Alnwick, we shared this as part of our learning about the war in the lead up to Remembrance Day. The children loved looking at them and talking about the items and what it would be like for an evacuee. 
We have been busy learning about feelings and how we might feel when things happen. We made our own emoticon faces with playdough, what great fun. Some of us made cool faces, happy faces and sad faces! 
We have a Forest School session every week and we have had lots of fun so far this half term. Here we are collecting bugs and making spiders using conkers.
We made our own Diya Lamps for Diwali and enjoyed decorating them with bright colours and glitter for the festival of light.
Our chosen class charity was the Alnwick District Food Bank. We are thankful for all the donations from families across school and the food bank were very grateful. Thank you!
We loved welcoming families to our whole school Harvest service at Church before we broke up for half term, we did a marvellous job singing the song - Big red combine harvester. 
We were so thankful to Mrs Abercrombie who launched our week of visitors to our class to talk to us about her job as a doctor. Our topic is when I grow up I’d like to be a …. So we are looking at jobs some of our families have. Mrs Abercrombie brought in some poorly bears - one had a cut, a poorly tummy, ear and cough. We got to use stethoscopes, thermometers, bandages, urine testing strips and much more to help the bears to get better. By the time they left with Mrs Abercrombie they were a lot better after all our mini doctors had worked their magic on them. What a fun way to learn about the role of a doctor in such a practical way. 
Another visitor to talk to us about her job was Mrs Moralee to tell us about her role at the Bosk, holiday cottages and as a celebrant for weddings, we found out that Mrs Moralee is very busy and sometimes has 54 beds to change as well as 12 cottages to get ready for new guests as well as the bosk with its swimming pool, restaurant, games room and upcoming sauna!
Mr Drummond came to see us and talk about his job as a farmer. He told us how he has cows and sheep on his farm but he also talked about where our food comes from and that most of the foods we had for our breakfast had actually come from a farm. He showed us a cow passport as well as tags and explained that each animal has these so that they can be identified. He also showed us some sheep’s wool and we talked about things that are made from this. He told us about how farmers jobs are to grow crops and feed the animals but also look after hedgerows and grasslands to help wildlife such as bugs as well as deer, stoats, rabbits etc! Farming is a big job!
Mrs Osborne visited us to talk to us about her job as an emergency healthcare assistant. Mrs Osborne told us a story about - my mummy the paramedic, as she helps the paramedics and drives the ambulances! Mrs Osborne even brought a toy ambulance in for us to look at and an interactive picture and videos showing a real ambulance. We are going to enquire about getting a visit to school from the ambulance service. We got to use some things that Mrs Osborne brought in such as a mask and oxygen on the dummy and the stethoscope. Mrs Osborne also talked about the importance of knowing the number to call for an ambulance and our addresses in case we ever need to call.
Mrs Ling who is a veterinary nurse came to speak to us today. She told us all about her job and how she works while we sleep sometimes. She said not only does she look after peoples pets, she also teaches their owners how to care for them too. She brought in some pretend patients and we enjoyed listening to their chests and tummies. We saw some x rays too and we loved getting to try on a gown, cap and gloves. Great fun.
We were very lucky to be invited into Mrs Arkle’s kitchen,she told us about all her job as a cook and she was busy making the Christmas pudding today and we put all our wishes into it too. Mrs Arkle gave us all a chef hat to wear too. We enjoyed finding out about the jobs she has to do. 
We wore wellies to school to support our British farmers and the farming community on 19th November.
During road safety week we learned the green cross code as part of a fun song and then we used the road on our playground to practise crossing safely, we even created our own zebra crossing and had our own vehicles to stop, look and listen for. A fun way to learn about the importance of keeping safe.
Reception visited St Bartholomew’s with Rev Rich as part of our RE learning journey. He showed us what happens when a baby is baptised and told us about the meaning of the special words that are said and the things that are used. He also shared with us the special preparations that are being made to get ready for Christmas and told us how Christmas will be celebrated by the local Church community. As a special treat we even got to ring the Church bell.
oday we had a special visit from a Manners wagon, Mr Manners brought us a wagon in to have a look at and have a sit in, the children had some great questions - how many wheels does it have? How long does it take to drive to London? Etc. we loved sitting in the drivers seat and some of us had a peep of the horn
We were kindly gifted some advent calendars for each and every child from a local computing business. Thank you! 
Our reception children are busy learning their letter sounds and are now able to segment to spell new words. We have been busy learning about jobs and one of our stories was Mog and the vet, we wrote about Mog in the story.
We participated in our whole school Santa dash. We all looked very festive. 
We performed our nativity Whoopsy Daisy Angel with Class One, we really enjoyed sharing this with all of our families. 
Nursery have been doing some lovely mark making and writing to Father Christmas about our elf and reception have been writing letters and applying all the phonics sounds they have been learning this term. 
EYFS and KS1 Christmas Dinner Day - 16th December 
 
Mrs Arkle made us a delicious Christmas lunch today! We all enjoyed some Christmas music, some crackers and even a singing turkey!
We have been learning about animals and the world around us, we started by looking at a globe and learning about the seven continents, we talked about how some continents are hotter than others and therefore more suited to different animals. 
As part of our learning about the world and looking a little bit at climate change we made some Earth toast, we enjoyed making our Earth toast and could visibly see how our world is heating up with all the climate change. We enjoyed eating our toast afterwards!
What great fun in our outdoor area, the children began building a balance scale which was fantastic as it recapped some learning we had done in maths a while ago. They could instantly recall that the heaviest person was the person that made the scale go down. They had great fun trying out who was heavier and adding each other on to see if it changed the scale. 
We are keen scientists in Early Years and often do investigations, this was an investigation about floating and sinking, we made predictions and then checked to see if our predictions were right. We understand that if something floats it sits on top of the water and if it sinks it goes under the water. We had good fun and will investigate further and next week go onto making boats that float! 
We have really enjoyed having a travel agents role play which we then developed into an aeroplane role play to take us on our holidays. Mrs Manners even dressed up in her old work costume as she used to be an Air Hostess, so she talked to us about what her job was and looked after us when we flew on our holidays. The children took turns to be the Pilot too. 
We have been learning about Chinese New Year. We talked about how it is the year of the Snake and looked at what animal we are depending on what year we were born in. We then made some lanterns and got to colour in some Chinese New Year pictures. We shared and listened to the story of how the 12 zodiac animals were chosen. 
The children were given a challenge to make a boat for one of the small world people for them to go on their holidays. Each child was given a piece of foil to make their boat from and they all set to work, the children knew the boat would need sides to stop the water going in. We had great fun testing them in the water tray and some boats could hold more than one person, some started to get water in and then begin to sink. 

Later in the week we also made boats using the duplo bricks. 
We have been learning and writing animal facts. Look at our super effort segmenting new and tricky words! 
We have introduced a cooking area into our classroom and so we have been busy modelling and showing the children how we can use our new cooking area. We are also teaching them how to wash up and dry their pots afterwards. They did a marvellous job and hope this area will encourage lots of independence skills.
Here we are using our phonic skills to blend to read words such as hat, plant, truck and find them in the pictures in the Where’s Wally book! 
Sometimes our interests and learning take us to lots of places, here we are having great fun seeing how long a Boa Constrictor is compared to us, we found out they are approximately 2.5 metres long and then we measure the number tiles to this length, it is longer than two of us together!
We have enjoyed gymnastics in PE in the Spring term. 
We celebrated Shrove Tuesday in Early Years, also known as Pancake day by making our own pancakes, flipping pretend ones and some of us even wrote a pancake shopping list! Yummy!
We celebrated World Book Day at Lilidorei and had great fun, we took part in the World Book Day parade, heard a story in the story telling area, we had to search the forest for clues to make our own stories and then we got to play on the play area before returning back to school. What a fabulous morning we had. We also enjoyed trying to guess who the masked readers were.
Look at how we can make 10, we can use objects to show the number bonds of ten as well as part whole models. 
Early Years and Class One were very lucky to receive some first aid training by Ashleigh from Northern Training Partnership. We found out that shouting for help is important and the number we might need to call if we are the only person with an adult who needs help. We learned how to open someone’s airway and put them in the recovery position. We also had the opportunity to put bandages on pretend wounds. We had great fun putting the bandages on the teachers too! Thank you so much to Ashleigh! 
After reading the story how tall is a T Rex we had lots of questions. We decided to measure out its head which is 145cm, it’s tooth 25 cm and from his head to his tail 12 metres! We worked together to hold the measuring tape and metre sticks and draw a line with chalk to show the lengths. We were all shorter than its head but all bigger than its tooth. We then all laid out to see if we were longer or shorter than an T rex altogether, we were longer - just!
We know the importance of keeping healthy and that we need to keep fit by doing exercises and keeping active, eat healthy foods, drink lots of water and make sure we get plenty of sleep. Reception wrote about how to keep healthy. 
We had an amazing afternoon with our mummies to celebrate Mother's Day, we made bracelets and gave them their biscuits we made them, we also gave them the flowers and jars that we painted and a blow up flower to take home. Thank you so much for joining us!
Rev Rich and Mrs Townend joined us for our Godly play worship and they told us the story of the mystery of Easter. We looked at the circle of the church and how each segment represents each Sunday, we can see that Easter is represented by symbols. The white is celebration and the green is preparation and known as great green growing Sunday, the purple for advent and lent.

We had a special purple bag because we are in purple now and we found 6 pieces in the bag, for 6 weeks of preparation in the lead up to Easter. We looked at the pieces and made predictions of what we thought the pieces were. The children had a go at putting the pieces together and then Rev Rich put the pieces together and we discovered it was a cross, the purple can signify sadness and then when we turned it over it turned to white - for celebration, so Easter can also be a celebration.
Mr Drummond very kindly brought in some baby pet lambs to visit us, they were very friendly and loved cuddles. We also fed them some milk
Our babes in the wood session was our open forest school session and we had an Easter special, we decorated eggs to egg roll and did an Easter egg hunt. We finished our afternoon with some hot juice.