Spring term overview
Our learning in the Spring term...
Our Vehicle for this half term is “Superheroes”.
Through this curriculum driver we will be looking at stories with a superhero theme, Supersnail, Spertato, Super Ted, Batfink and Traction man. We will look at poetry that connect to these stories and explore the different characters. Alongside this, we will look at the past and explore what the past means with video clips from the past. We will also be using our senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste to explore the world around us. We will look at other festivals and celebrations over this term, including Chinese new year.
Religious Education
Following completion of our unit of work on ‘Christmas’, we will be moving onto ‘Baptism’. Children will learn to identify symbols of Baptism. They will learn that this is a special celebration to welcome people into God’s family, and that at Baptism people are given a Christian name. They will participate in role-playing a Baptism celebration and will learn about Jesus being the ‘Light of the World’.
We will also be finding out about Chinese New Year celebrations.
PRIME AREAS OF LEARNING
Communication and Language
The development of children’s spoken language underpins all seven areas of learning and development. We continue to support the children in learning new vocabulary and developing their spoken language through using ‘My Turn Your Turn’ and stem sentences modelled by the adults, role-play activities, lots of discussion and opportunities to ask questions.
Personal Social and Emotional Development
Children’s personal social and emotional development is crucial for children to lead healthy and happy lives. We continue to support them to learn and develop their personal social and emotional skills through developing strong and supportive relationships with the adults in the class and their peers. Through stories and activities including ‘Circle Time’, they will identify and name emotions, and are supported to reflect on and self-regulate their feelings and behaviour.
Physical Development
This half term the children will continue to learn gymnastic skills.
We encourage the children to get changed for PE themselves and they are doing brilliantly!
Please could you ensure that every item of PE kit and school uniform is clearly marked with your child’s name. As you can imagine – when 30 children are getting changed, it can be very difficult for them, and us, to match items of clothing with the correct child if it is not named. Thank you for your support with this.
Next half term we will begin to look at key skills, including throwing and catching. We will begin to play some simple games.
Our children benefit from continuous provision and have access to the reception outdoor area freely in afternoons. Children practise, develop, and progress in gross motor skills with a range of physical development activities.
Physical Development is also about the development of fine motor skills, including holding a pencil correctly in order to write. The children participate in lots of activities which develop their fine motor, including threading, lacing, picking up small objects with child tweezers, dough disco, scissor skills.
SPECIFIC AREAS OF LEARNING
Literacy
Children are taught to read and spell through daily phonics – Read Write Inc. sessions. They will learn and practise recognising and sounding letters, use ‘Fred talk’ to read and ‘Fred Fingers’ to spell.
Weekly read write inc homework is set in homework books and your child has been assigned a group that matches their class work.
We will focus on many familiar texts this year, and not so familair texts this term. We will use these texts, their characters and their settings to raise our curiosity about stories and to inspire our own ideas in drawing club.
Children learn a new poem weekly. These poems connect to the book focus. Children will listen to the poem, create actions for the poem, learn the poem and perform the poem. This helps to develop language, rhyming, performance skills and listening skills.
Mathematics
We follow the ‘Power Maths’ Scheme which focuses on mastering key skills which will allow children to gain a secure understanding before moving on, thus building the foundations for future learning. Throughout Autumn term, there was an emphasis on ‘number sense’, ensuring a solid grasp of numbers 1-5, including their composition – looking at the parts that make the whole number.
During the first part of Spring Term, we will be developing the fundamental mathematical skills of sorting and recognising, describing, continuing and creating patterns, before moving onto numbers to 10. During maths sessions, the children will use a variety of concrete resources and a variety of pictorial representations, as well as the abstract numerals that represent each number.
Understanding the World
We will continue to support the children to make sense of their physical world and their community through the stories that we learn in class. Through our traditional tales, we will look at similarities and differences of now and the past by looking at settings, characters and our own experiences. We will find places we read about on a map and create our own maps in class. We will be learning about the five senses of: sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. We will create Year of the Tiger craft, and hopefully taste some Chinese food. We will provide the children with STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematical) activities and allow the children to investigate these where appropriate.
Expressive Arts and Design
Our Art focus this half term is to explore, design and make a series of different puppets from different materials. We will make stick puppets, moving puppets, sock puppets and we will design and sew a puppet as our final project. We will continue to mix primary colours to create secondary colours as well as looking at different shades as part of our learning in our continuous provision.
In Music, we will continue to use the Charanga Music Platform to learn to sing along with nursery rhymes and action songs, to listen and respond to different styles of music, to play classroom instruments, and to demonstrate the learning that has taken place through sharing and performing.