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Early Years Newsletter
January 2009
Dear Parents
I hope you all enjoyed the Christmas
break and extra quality time spent with your children. I would like this
opportunity of welcoming everyone back to school.
PE
Class One have PE on a Monday morning and Friday afternoon. Can children
please bring their PE kits into school so that they can change ready for
their lesson. We will be continuing to practise and encourage children
to begin to undress and dress into their PE kits by themselves so it
would be very helpful if children are encouraged to dress themselves at
home.
If you have any concerns or issues
concerning your child please do not hesitate to raise these with me. I
shall be available to speak to, on the playground at 8.50 or you can
arrange a mutually convenient appointment after school.
Curriculum Overview
The curriculum has been designed and
planned to cover all six areas of the Foundation Stage Curriculum and
Early Learning Goals. This term our topic is based on the theme of food
with a different focus each week.
| Week |
Focus |
| 1 |
Cereals |
| 2 |
Bread |
| 3 |
Fruit |
| 4 |
Vegetables |
| 5 |
Fish/Meat/Poultry |
|
6 |
Food from around the World |
| |
|
| Personal, Social and
Emotional Development |
Communication, Language
and Literacy |
|
Getting On and Falling Out: Through circle games, stories and
activities children will be introduced to the issues of
cooperating with other children and working in a group. Children
will have the opportunity to develop and practise the social
skills of sharing and taking turns, listening to each other and
understanding some of the ways in which someone can be a friend. |
Children
will develop their language and literacy skills through
structured and unstructured discussions linked to books, topic,
routines and events. They will listen and act out stories
involving food such as Jack and the Beanstalk and The
Gingerbread Man as well as listening to texts on the tape
recorder. Children will develop their emergent writing skills
through writing shopping lists, practise forming letters and
patterns using pens, pencils, chalks, paint, sand and dough.
Reception children will continue to develop their reading and
writing skills through the ‘Sounds’ Write’ program. |
| Mathematical Development |
Knowledge and
Understanding of the World |
|
Through
number songs and rhymes children will begin to recognise and
recite the numerals beyond 10. They will begin to compare and
order numbers and count reliably up to 12 objects. Children will
use the language of adding and relate addition to combining two
groups of objects as well as separate (partition) a given number
of objects into 2 groups. They will use shapes in models and
pictures, naming and matching solid and flat shapes. Children
will begin to relate subtraction as taking away and will use
coins in play contexts to buy and give change.
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Children will extend and develop their observational and
investigative skills through observing, sorting, making and
comparing a wide range of foods. They will weigh and measure
ingredients to bake fairy cakes and observe changes such as
butter melting and cake mixture cooking changing from liquid to
solid form. Children will carry out surveys and discuss their
favourite food and use graphing software to record their
results. Children will be able to explore food from other
countries and begin to understand and involve themselves in
planting seeds to grow their own cress and beans.
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| Physical Development |
Creative |
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Gymnastics: Children will have the opportunity to develop an
awareness and understanding of their body movements through
activities designed to promote ‘Stretching and Curling.’ They
will explore different ways of stretching their bodies, using
their hands, and feet and begin to take weight on different body
parts ton balance in different positions-emphasising body shape-
high, low, over, under, stretching and curling. |
Children will be involved with activities involving different
media such as paints, crayons, collage, malleable materials and
use their imagination through role play based on stories and
games based around the theme of food. They will design posters
and labels for the cafe, make their own saltdough play food,
print patterns using fruit and vegetables as well as role play
scenes in the class shop. In music they will sing songs and
nursery rhymes associated with food as well as playing
traditional ring games including Kim’s games, I’m a Little
Teapot, Go to Market |
Mrs C White
Early Years Specialist Teacher
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