Spring term begins with Explorers, which links to our Commando Joe theme of excellence and the wonderful story of Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers.
Our role-play activities transport children into a world of imagination and exciting adventures with a hot air balloon, sky transportation, sailing on a ship, and camping in a jungle. Our small worlds and loose parts activities link and allow children explore the fascinating lives of pirates and explorers
This term, Amelia Earhart, David Attenborough, and Ernest Shackleton guide our learning in Knowledge and Understanding of the World.
We also celebrate the Lunar New Year, exploring its traditions. Within our science learning, we investigate floating and sinking. Our Expressive Art and Design projects allow the children to take on challenges themed around planes and boats.
Executive functioning skills will be both explicitly taught and interwoven into our wider learning experiences, with a key focus on emotional regulation. Our LEAD Drivers of Diversity, Recall, Irresistible Learning, Values and Expert continue to be promoted and celebrated with our clouds and integrated into our school day.
Our daily structure contains a phonics lesson at the beginning of the day, mastering number maths in the middle and our reading and understanding of the world sessions in the afternoons.
In phonics, we are focusing on phase 3 GPCs, including blending words with these sounds in, reading sentences and writing words too. For more information, head to our Phonics and Early Reading information page.
In mastering number we focus on knowledge of numbers to 5 and 10. In our Shape, Space and Measure sessions we focus on 2D shapes, measuring using non-standardised units, capacity and time.
In our outdoor sand area, we focus on fine motor skills by encouraging children to use one-handed tools and equipment, as well as choosing the right resources to carry out their own plan. Our construction projects such as den building and plane making are carefully designed to develop our personal, social and emotional development (PSED), executive functioning and teamwork skills. Then Den, with its music focus links to our learning based on Music and Movement, where we explore action songs, tempo, beat and pitch. The mud kitchen supports our Maths skills (working within 5 and 10) as well as our fine motor skills. Our gross motor skills are based on variety of obstacle courses, different ways of travelling and balance.
In the second part of the Spring Term, we maintain a high focus on developing executive functioning skills. We focus on this, alongside our academy values throughout our curriculum, to enable children to develop resilience and problem solving skills and also develop their mental flexibility skills to enable them to become expert learners.
We focus on and use the Colour Monster as a tool for emotional regulation, as this is something that has supported the children through a visual approach, since they began Reception. This resource helps children develop the ability to talk about various emotions, express how they are feeling and why they might be feeling that way.
Our timetable continues to be structured, with a phonics lesson at the beginning of the day, mastering number maths in the middle and our reading and understanding of the world sessions in the afternoons. In phonics, we are focusing on phase 3 GPCs, including blending words with these sounds in, reading sentences and writing words too. This supports us in our reading sessions, where we completing decoding, prosody and comprehension tasks.
Our mastering number focus this term continues to be within 5, with some stretches to 10. We learn about the composition of each number, ordinality and cardinality and how each number has a relationship with other numbers. We love our mastering number sessions so much and are experts at talking about our learning, and how we know what we know.
For Spring Two, our Reception areas are set up to continue our learning about explorers, but this time, more widely. In our small world and role play areas, children continue to use their imagination, as they explore space and develop their understanding of the solar system and the planets within it. We’re also diving into the fascinating world dinosaurs! We love these topics, as they are great for developing our imagination and inspire our craft and writing opportunities.
To develop our understanding of the World, focusing on People, Culture and Communities, we explore celebrations of Easter and Holi. Children learn about who celebrates these festivals, what they do to celebrate including the unique traditions and the similarities and differences between each, compared to the festivals we have learnt about previously.
A range of mark making resources will be available for the children to explore independently and we will introduce the use of new media including: oil pastels and water colours. The children can use their imagination in the craft area, to create and draw linked to our topics or anything else they can use, and use their ever growing knowledge of colour, media and materials along the way!
In our outdoor area, we are focused on developing and refining our fine motor skills, particularly changing direction, balancing and arm and leg movements. We achieve this by building obstacle courses, using wobble boards, playing group games and using our outdoor play equipment. We also have opportunities to use our mud kitchen to explore adding ingredients with a maths focus, our water wall to explore the movement of water from one place to the next and our den structure which can be anything we choose!
We love to play outside, exploring and being creative beyond the classroom and this extends into lots of forest school activities too – stay tuned on Tapestry.
We are looking forward to…
