We have loved learning all about winter during this half term.  We have read non-fiction books about winter, looked at how to use a contents page and made our own winter book.  Now we are focusing on the story of Stick Man.  We have retold the story through play and by following a story map and this week we are going to add a new page to the adventure.  We have had lots of different writing opportunities, including writing Stick Man speech bubbles and making Lost posters to help the Stick Lady Love to find him.  We have also enjoyed sharing our favourite Julia Donaldson books from home and telling the class all about them.

In maths, we have been counting backwards from 20. Try practising this at home, can you count backwards without skipping out any numbers?  We have also been finding the number one more and fewer than a number using objects.  Last week we started doubling using snowballs.  We can also double using our fingers!

We have been very creative, making winter paintings and pictures, making play dough snowflakes and snowmen.  We have used our camera to take photos of our own creations too.  Indoors and outdoors we have been playing and experimenting with ice: making predictions and asking questions about what is happening.  We have also been thinking about the birds in this icy weather.  We followed a set of instructions to make bird feeders which we have hung in our outdoor space and wrote our own shopping lists for the things that we needed to buy to make them.

We have been as busy as Santa’s elves here in EYFS!  We have been busy preparing for our “Nursery Rhyme Nativity”: singing and speaking in our loud, confident voices.  We are really looking forward to our performances.  

In literacy we have been reading the story of ‘Dear Santa’.  We are coming up with our own ideas to add our own pages to the story.  We have also been writing Christmas lists, letters to Santa and writing our own Christmas cards.  We have used speech bubbles and written our own little books to retell the story of the first Christmas.  In maths we have been ordering numbers to 10, 20 and beyond, as well as sequencing random numbers within 20.  We have been counting sounds accurately by playing an online game to count cracker bangs.  If you google ‘Topmarks Christmas Maths’ there are a range of fun activities in the 4-7 year old category.  In our discovery area we have been sorting and describing a range of Christmas decorations and objects.  In the construction area we have been designing and making sleighs for Santa.  Our creative area has been a festive glitter explosion!  We have been making tree decorations, designing cards and painting festive pictures to name but a few things.

We have loved our outdoor learning environment in this chilly months.  We created ice trays and troughs to investigate.  The children particularly enjoyed adding small world characters to the ice and creating their own stories. 

Every class at St Mary’s are preparing for Christmas by focusing on this special time of Advent.  In F2 we have made our own Advent calendar.  Each numbered star has a little task attached to it, based on prayer and kindness.  We are preparing for Christmas by carrying out a task each day.  We are reading the Bible stories about the first Christmas and our Sacred Space in class reflects this.  We have also started a travelling crib.  Each night a child will take home our special Advent bag.  Inside is a nativity scene, a candle and a special book.  We ask that you talk about the nativity scene together as a family.  We also invite you to light the candle and say a prayer together for anybody or anything that you would like to pray for in Advent.  We light the candle to remind us that Jesus is the light of the world.  Please record your prayer or share something that you talked about in the special book: be as creative as you wish!  We will share the book in class the next day.  We wish you a thoughtful and peaceful Advent.

We have have so much fun in our space topic, it has really brought out the excitement and creativity in our children.  We started the topic with some home learning where the children thought of things that they wanted to find out about space.  We used the internet and non-fiction books to answer lots of our interesting questions.  It turns out that the moon is not made of cheese after all!  Our main text was the Jill Murphy story ‘Whatever Next’.  We have acted it out and retold the story in different ways.   Baby Bear wrote us a letter asking for ideas of what to do in space; we used our phonics and our tricky words to write back to him!  We have been working hard at writing our ‘long legged giraffe’ letters: l,i,t,u,j,y.  Children have enjoyed practising these at home too.  In maths we have been identifying and describing 2D and 3D shapes.  We have hunted 3D shapes around the school and made space rockets from 3D shapes.  We have made space pictures using our 2D shapes.  We have also done lots of estimating and counting groups of objects using our moon rocks, as well as some adding by combining two groups.  We have done lots of creative activities including making cylinder  rocket models, oil pastel space scenes and play dough aliens.  Outside we have been ordering number rockets, blowing planets using our bubbles and making the International Space Station in the den making area.

To finish our autumn topic in F2 we have been thinking all about Bonfire Night.  We shared our experiences and watched firework display videos together.  We generated describing words and pretended to be fireworks, whooshing and popping and crackling!  We recited firework poems together and wrote our own firework poems based on the noise words we had listed.  We are getting good at using our phonics to have a go at writing new words.  We are trying to include finger spaces between our words too.  In our maths area we continued our firework theme by writing numbers in glitter with paintbrushes.  In the malleable area we used jewels and glittery play dough to make firework patterns.  In the creative area we have made oil pastel firework pictures and 3D rockets from cylinders.  We loved marble rolling in paint to make firework art too.  Outdoors we used the ribbons to create some fantastic firework dances, making weaving paths around each other.

Here in EYFS we have been learning all about autumn.  Our main text has been Owl Babies and we have had so much fun acting out the story and re-enacting it on our small world table.  We have been writing speech bubbles for the characters and labelling pictures of the story, using the letters we know to have a go.  We  have been very lucky to have a visit from owl baby Bill in our classroom!  We asked him lots of questions and we have exchanged letters since.  

We have been working hard learning our numbers and ordering them.  we have enjoyed conker rolling games which help us to practise identifying numbers.  We have also been using autumn objects to help us with our counting (using our pointing finger) and also adding two groups.

Thank you for all of your autumn artefacts, our table is overflowing!  We have enjoyed pattern making with them, looking carefully at them and making observational drawings.  We have also made owls, painted autumn trees and sang lots of autumn songs.

The children of F2 are settling well into our classroom routines and are exploring our learning environment.  We have enjoyed thinking about how we are different and special, just like Elmer the elephant.  We have acted out the story of Elmer and retold it using a story map.  We have even made our own Elmer books.  As another part of our topic we are exploring our senses.  We have talked about seeing and used describing words while looking through kaleidoscopes and viewers.  We have thought about the sense of touch and described items that we have put into feely tubs.  This week we are going on a listening walk to see what we can hear around our school.  In RE we are thinking all about how God made our wonderful world, including us!

Thank you for taking part in our number hunt at home.  We have enjoyed sharing all of the numbers that we have found in class.  You can continue to support your child by helping them to recognise numbers first to 10, then to 20 and beyond, and placing them in the correct order.

All of the children have settled so well into F2.  We have been familiarising ourselves with the class routines and how we use the areas in our indoor and outdoor learning environment.  We have begun our ‘All About Me’ topic by thinking about ourselves and what makes us different and special.  We have made self portraits, talked about our favourite books and songs, and roleplayed our own experiences in the home corner.  We are also learning about the story of Elmer and thinking about how fantastic it is to be unique!  Lots more fun and learning to follow…

As part of our bear topic, today all of the children in EYFS have enjoyed a teddy bears’ picnic.  To prepare, children in F2 have followed instructions to bake cakes for everybody and written lists of picnic food for teddy bears.  We have had lots of fun, singing teddy bear songs and playing games with our bears.  The bears have also enjoyed playing in our classroom: children chose to make dens for them in the construction area.  We have also been writing about them in our writing area.  If only our bears came into school with us every day!

A fantastic day was had by all at the EYFS sports day.  The sun shone for us and everybody was smiling!  All children participated in the beanbag balancing race, pick up race, egg and spoon race, and the running race (a firm favourite).  But the competitive spirit was most evident in the mum and dad races!  Our children showed excellent sportsmanship and were fantastic at cheering each other on.  

We had some special visitors in our classroom  who were teaching us about the importance of washing our hands properly.  We learnt about different germs and how they are spread.  We used special light boxes to look at where the dirt was on our hands that we couldn’t see.  We learnt how to wash our hands properly and we designed posters on our writing table to teach other people about this too.

We have had a wonderful time engaging with our bears topic here in EYFS.  Our main text is Michael Rosen’s ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’.  We have shared the story, reenacted it outdoors and retold it using a story map.  Next we will be changing the story to add our very own part to it.  We have also been retelling the story on our small world table and have made our own bear hunt puppets for the puppet theatre too.  In our maths area we have been grabbing handfuls of bears and counting them out in 1s and 2s.  We have been finding more more and less than quantities of bears too.  We have also been thinking about halving by sharing fruit between 2 bears for their picnic.  We have made playdough bears, plus bear caves in the construction area and in the junk modelling.  We have shared many bear books and talked about our favourites.  It has been lovely to see so many children engaging with our topic at home and bringing in work that they have produced.  What motivated learners we have!

Last week we finished our Gingerbread Man theme in F2.  We made our own gingerbread men in the malleable area.  We designed and made different vehicles in the construction area to help the gingerbread man to escape!  In literacy, we read the story from the sly fox’s point of view.  We learnt that he had no money and was so hungry, but the shop keeper refused to help him, so he ate the gingerbread man.  We came up with a list of suggestions for what the fox could have done instead: these included checking his piggy bank, eating at his friend’s house, going fishing, and even getting a job!  We wrote letters to the fox to tell him all of our ideas.

This week we started our new bear topic and are currently reading ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’.  We invite you to share different bear stories with your child at home.  The children can bring in their favourite bear stories to share with the class.

We have followed children’s interests on the investigation table after several children brought back shells from their holidays.  We have been drawing shells and pebbles, describing them and sorting them.

We have been busy planting and growing here in EYFS.  We have grown cress, sunflowers and beans. We made cress diaries to record how our seeds changed.  We are hoping to grow our very own beanstalk, just like Jack!  We have also created a garden area in our outdoors where we are looking after our new plants. 

 We have been thinking about God’s wonderful creation in F2.  We have been on a nature walk, looking at all of the wonderful things around us that we are thankful for.

F2 discovered that our mystery visitor that messed up our classroom was, in fact, the Gingerbread Man!  We had a letter and book from the Little Old Lady telling us that he had ran away.  We made Lost posters for her which described him.  We have learnt how to retell the story using a story map.  This week we decided to bake the little Old Lady (and ourselves) new gingerbread men and we have written out instructions for how to do it. 

 In maths we just HAD to eat some gingerbread men to make a pictogram!  Our pictogram showed how many people ate the head first, how many ate a leg first and who went for an arm.  The vast majority of our class are head biters!  We have been adding and subtracting using the raisins on gingerbread men; we have been measuring gingerbread men using a variety of materials and we have been making repeating patterns.

Our creative class have been making stick puppets to retell the story in our puppet theatre area.  We have designed our own gingerbread men and made maps of the Gingerbread Man’s journey.  We learnt a song about the story and performed it with instruments.  We used beebots in ICT to programme a set of instructions to help the gingerbread man to reach the river.  Over in our construction area we have designed and made bridges so that the poor Gingerbread Man does not end up in the fox’s mouth!  We have also loved taking on the different story roles in our outdoor learning environment.

Yesterday we got back from our lunch to find that our writing table was covered with tiny, dusty footprints and a trail of sweets and sprinkles!  The children and staff are very confused about who our mystery visitor could have been that made such a mess of our classroom.  We have been gathering clues and writing lists of suspects. It has caused a real buzz in our classroom.  Suggestions of the culprit have ranged from the elves from The Elves and the Shoemaker or Burglar Bill, to Donald Trump!  The investigation continues…

We had a fabulous trip to Cockfields Farm.  Thank you so much to our amazing helpers!  We fed lots of different animals as well as holding, stroking and cuddling lots more.  We met alpacas, pigs, chameleons and even a boa constrictor!  We learnt lots and had an amazing experience.  Bouncing on the trampoline together and eating our packed lunches were firm highlights too!

As part of our Spring theme we have been reading Jack and the Beanstalk.  We found magic beans in our classroom which grew overnight into a huge beanstalk.  We were lucky enough to have Jack himself visit our classroom!  We thought of lots of interesting questions that we could ask him.  We have been retelling the story in different ways and will be writing our own version of the story.  and We are also investigating plants.  We have been looking carefully at different plants and we will be growing our own plants too.

Ever since our Easter performance we have been music mad!  We have enjoyed using the musical instruments outside and are still singing our Easter songs.  We have been performing them on our stage too.  The children in our class have also been making their own puppets in our creative area, so we are following this interest and have set up our own puppet theatre.

During Holy Week we focused on the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection on the first Easter.  We loved celebrating Easter with our Easter bonnet parade, thank you parents and carers for helping us with our hats!  In our classroom we have been thinking about changes that happen in spring: flowers growing, animals being born, and a little bit of sunshine at last!  We have been writing all about spring, making observational drawings of spring flowers, and designing our own Easter Eggs.  Outdoors we have had lots of fun planting and playing with soil in our mud kitchen.  We have been adding and taking away using flowers.  We are all learning to order and recognise to 20 and beyond.  Some of us are learning to count groups of objects by counting in twos.

As part of our People Who Help Us topic, we invited our lollipop lady to visit our class.  We all made her thank you cards and presented them to her.  We had thought about questions that we wanted to ask her, and she told us all about her job.  We even got to hold her stick!