Nursery Julia Donaldson Class

Welcome to Nursery - Donaldson Class

Welcome to the nursery class of September 2023! I am very excited to teach your children this year and I am looking forward to helping them in their learning and development.

At Our Lady and St Gerard’s we have a welcoming, nurturing and calm nursery classroom, where all the activities are easily accessible for our children. Our children are very independent and are able to choose activities and move around the classroom when they please. Within our setting, the children have access to both indoor and outdoor learning, offering endless possibilities throughout the range of different areas of learning. This can sometimes mean that they can come home wet and muddy – more mess, more fun we say!

This year Nursery will be following ‘Year B’ and all of the themes are found on the long term plan. The first theme Nursery will be learning over Autumn 1 is ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You. This will include a lot of activities such as, self-portraits, feelings, families and using our senses. If you would like to see this in more detail please have a look at the medium term planning on the Nursery website. A crucial part of our Early Years planning is following our children’s interests, meaning some of the activities planned for may not be done or could be changed due to their lead and ideas. To support our learning and curriculum, I will sometimes require parents to bring in different items to help us complete these activities so please keep up to date with any dojo posts and/or letters sent home.

Ways to help at home

Some children find it difficult to help to tidy up at nursery; therefore please can parents encourage children at home to tidy up independently. Give your child some simple and short instructions.
Please can parents allow children to try and get dressed independently (i.e. putting jumpers on and shoes) because it helps them get ready for Reception class next September. It also helps myself and Mrs Crook throughout the day.
Please can parents label every single piece of clothing, including wellies and coats. Wellies will be kept in school for those muddy and rainy days.
Help your child to count and recognise numbers through games, walking to school and even at the supermarket.
Help your child to begin to recognise sounds in their environment, making links to initial sounds of words.

Phonics

Throughout the Autumn term, we will be primarily focusing on aspects 1-4 of phase 1 phonics. The first four aspects consist of;

Aspect 1 – Environmental Sound Discrimination
Aspect 2 – Instrumental Sound Discrimination
Aspect 3 – Body Percussion Sound Discrimination
Aspect 4 – Rhythm and Rhyme

The purpose of these different aspects is to develop students’ language abilities in the following ways:

Learning to listen attentively
Enlarging their vocabulary
Speaking confidently to adults and other children
Discriminating between different phonemes
Reproducing audibly the phonemes they hear

Why is Phase 1 phonics important?

In Phase 1, children do not learn any letters or the sounds they make. The purpose of Level 1 is to develop children's listening and communication skills, including their vocabulary, to prepare them for reading and writing in the next Phase. If children do not fully develop these skills it can mean that they may struggle to hear the individual sounds in words, which can mean children find it much harder to spell and blend sounds for reading. This phase is split into 7 aspects that are explored and developed through games.

Nursery Drop in sessions

Nursery will be holding a drop in session from 3.30pm onwards on Tuesday 13^th September. This is an opportunity to have a look around the classroom and to ask any questions.

Stay and Play

At Our Lady and St Gerard’s we have an open door policy, which means parents can call in at any time to see their children if you are unable to attend the sessions throughout the year. Please see either myself or Mrs Crook. You can call into these sessions for either 10 minutes or for an hour. At the moment however, I would like the children to settle in first. The later dates are:

Tuesday 3rd October – 12.45am-1.45am.

Wednesday 8^th November- 12.45pm- 1.45pm.

If your child does not attend nursery during these sessions, you are more than welcome to come with them for the stay and play hour.

Please remember to bring….

Please ensure your child has named wellies in school as they will be needed at various times throughout the school year. To further support our current topics, please also bring in/send via dojo photographs of your child as a baby, a family photo and a photo of your child enjoying their favourite hobby. I will photocopy these pictures as soon as I receive them so please don’t worry about them getting spoiled.

Any queries or questions please don’t hesitate to contact me via school dojo.

Kindest Regards,

Mrs Todd

EARLY YEARS CURRICULUM

As an Early Years team, we have developed a wonderful curriculum which caters for the children's interests. The overview below contains an outline of the topics we cover, but the content of the topics are adapted according to the needs and interests of our children. To find out more information about our EYFS curriculum please see the curriculum map below.

For more information on the new Early Years Curriculum 2021 please go to - Key Information- Curriculum - Early Years.

Dear parents,

The EYFS team have produced a document to inform you about the key knowledge your child will learn throughout each half term.

Below are the the Nursery knowledge organisers for Spring 2, Spring 1 & Autumn 2.