A Stroll through storytime woods...  

This term we have carefully chosen a wide range of core books that not only excite the children but also build a love for learning and reading. We also want to give children a range of opportunities to experience nature and the colourful delights that Autumn has to offer. We have planned some of our learning experiences around our core texts to enable the children to immerse themselves within the pages of the book!

Our core books this term:

               

     

What learning opportunities we will offer this term...

We will begin the term with a stroll around our amazing outside spaces, rambling through the trees and through the nature reserve. We will be looking for clues...has the Gruffalo been here! We will use the outside space to search for items that relate to our core story. We will be finding things that are brown like the Gruffalo or long like the snake. All of these activities focus the children's attention and observation skills. We will learn about woodland animals, using descriptive language to description their characteristics and learning about where they live and their habitats.

     

In phonics, we will begin by focusing on phase 1 aspects of phonics learning. This includes hearing general sound discrimination, identifying rhythm, rhyme, alliteration and being able to orally blend and segment simple words. We will be playing lots of listening games to support our listening and attention skills.

As the term progresses we will begin to learn the know grapheme phoneme correspondence of 19 letters.  We will blend with known letters for reading VC and CVC words, Orally segment for VC and CVC words for spelling and Know high-frequency common words (the, to, no, go). We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds revised phonics scheme.

In maths, we are focusing on children’s ability to recognise, represent and manipulate numbers to 5. Children begin by counting groups of objects up to 3, then 4, before looking at 5. Children will learn to recognise and count different representations of numbers up to 5 and use a five frame to help structure the counting and reasoning.  We use the White Rose Maths to support our maths teaching.

     

We will be creating a wide range of art work from natural materials we find on our ramble. We will collect leaves and feathers to create collages and use sticks and wool to weave. We will explore artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and Nils Udo who use nature as their inspiration. We will explore using natural materials to paint with and explore using natural materials in dough. Lavender in dough a must try!

     

Developing our gross and fine motor control is vital this term in preparing us for our writing. We use an amazing resource called "squiggle while you wiggle" by Shonette Bason. The children love using ribbons (flappers) to create a various movements and then use mark making tools to draw the patterns. Here is a little insight into squiggle wiggle.