Term 3 - ‘Starry Night’ and ‘Winter Wonderland’

Starry Night 

The children learnt about the difference between day and night and about people who work at night when they are asleep. They created sun and moon pictures and sang songs about daytime and nighttime. Then, using the story ‘Handa’s Noisy Night’, our focus turned to animals that sleep during the day, from around the world. The children listened to animal noises and joined in action songs about nocturnal animals. Discovering the moon, led onto exploring space. The children built junk model rocket ships, and role-played being astronauts launching into space. 

Winter Wonderland

For this topic, the children were introduced to the winter season. They tried on a variety of winter clothing and designed their own jumpers. They discovered places around the world where the weather is always wintery; learning about the Arctic and the animals that live there, especially penguins. This naturally led onto thinking about snow, and exploring snow-themed gloop in messy play, making igloos out of cardboard boxes and doing frozen-paint pictures. 

The nursery had a special dance workshop with a local performing arts teacher, where they acted out a trip to an icy world and danced to music from ‘Frozen’. As well as all this, they continued to learn about numbers, shapes and the first sounds of the phonics scheme, Read Write Inc., and much more. 

Term 4 - 'On the Farm' and 'At the Zoo'

The children have learnt about animals that live on the farm, exploring different noises and footprints of the animals. They were introduced to maps, through our story What the Ladybird Heard, and how to follow a map around a simple farm layout. They made footprints and tractor track paintings, as well as animal collages.

We then moved onto zoo animals, and made different enclosures for the animals, as well as learning about the zoo keepers who care for them. The children made bear pictures and compared their handprints with an elephant's footprint. 

In our last week of term, our focus as been on Easter. The children made Easter cards and chocolate rice crispie cakes, as well as learning about the Christian story of Easter.

The children have continued to explore shapes, counting, and learning the first sounds of our phonics program.