This week, we have tried to build our local knowledge of, and our links with the Sevenoaks community. We had an enjoyable visit to the Emily Jackson Care Home last week. It was a truly positive experience for the residents and children alike. It was lovely to watch the interaction whilst carrying out joint activities. The children had fun decorating the gingerbread biscuits and making a stained-glass Christmas display.

It has been a brilliant week, concluding in our celebration of International Day today. The nursery class focused on Spain and enjoyed the opportunity to sing a Spanish song to the whole school this afternoon. We also celebrated all the different nationalities that make up our families by painting flags and finding out ways to say 'Good morning' and 'Goodbye' in different languages. Additionally, we looked at Flamenco dancing and had a go at playing the castanets!

The best part of the day was tasting all the delicious Spanish food, including potatas bravas, tapas, paella and churros.

Here is some of the learning that has taken place in the last two weeks:

Activities to support our learning

Expressive Art and Design

The focus has been to make imaginative and complex ‘small worlds’. The children have been busy creating a city with different buildings and a park (based on the children’s current interest in the tall buildings in London). There has been interesting enclosures and buildings made using large wooden blocks and magnetic shapes for a farm, safari animals and dinosaurs along with small, multi-national people for the School's International Day.

Literacy

Our Foundation for Phonics for the last two weeks focused on the nursery rhymes 'Wind the Bobbin up' and 'The Grand Old Duke of York'. We have been building our sound knowledge with activities such as voice sounds; What’s that sound?; listening to sound patterns, and rhyming, syllable, and alliteration games. Hands-on experiences such as winding and unwinding thread around old cotton reels and threading pasta and cotton reels onto string to make necklaces has helped to understand the meaning behind the rhyme 'Wind the Bobbin up'. Similarly, activities to support 'The Grand Old Duke of York' included marching like a soldier, standing tall and straight with swinging arms' and playing a marching rhythm on drums and cymbals.

Maths

We have been working on our numerosity and counting to 3; comparing numbers 1, 2 and 3 – ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’; ordering the numbers 1 to 3 and understanding that 3 is made of 2 and 1, Play -all at once fingers’ We have also been reciting numbers past number 5 in our daily tasks such as putting away the correct resources during tidy-up to match labels on containers and checking that nothing is missing as well as putting the right number of snacks on the table.

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Understanding of the World/Science

Thank you for sending in the acorns collected on your walks. We have been planting them them and talking about what we need to do with helping them grow. We told the children that it takes time and patience to see growth and that it may take a long time. We are hoping that we can watch them grow into little trees!

                                               Listening and attention 
What a difference the last two weeks have made! Everyone is now settling in to a comfortable routine and getting to know each other. There have been lovely conversations going on, with the children making gradual progress in communication skills by listening carefully and paying attention during group circle time.

For our Understanding of the World, we continued our investigation of trees and further explored the creatures living in our oak tree habitat. We have found out about the creepy crawlies that live within the cracks of the bark; the birds that nest on the branches, and the owls that come out at night. Combining all of this with Expressive Art and Design, we looked at Kandinsky’s colourful painting of a tree and created our own painting using concentric circles of different colours.

We have been enjoying Rhyme time for our Foundation for Phonics by singing ‘Miss Polly had a Dolly’ and ‘One, Two, Buckle my Shoe’. We first acted out the songs using props and then played some sound and alliteration games to scaffold our learning. (Please do continue to sing these rhymes at home, focusing on rhyming words such as; hat and rat-a-tat-tat; Two and shoe etc.)

For maths, we have been working on numerosity and the two-ness of things in relation to ‘one and another one makes two’ and the three-ness of three. Numberblocks and hands-on activities such as sorting the animals two by two for Noah’s Ark; lining up in twos for our walk to practice road safety, and dividing the dough into three balls to make bread, All of these have helped to embed this.

We have begun our curriculum by focusing our learning on oak trees; supported by a story called The Oak Tree by Julia Donaldson. Non-fiction books on trees and time lapsed videos have also captured our interest in the subject. A walk to Kippington Meadow to look at an ancient oak tree has consolidated our learning about the features of an oak tree, but unfortunately we found very few acorns on the trees and ground. Our painted oak tree is now proudly displayed in the school hall for the whole-school work on trees.