Welcome back! I hope you have had a fantastic relaxing holiday and you are feeling rested and recharged for a busy Autumn 2!

Our theme for this half-term is 'Sparkle and Shine' all our learning activities will be linked to colour, light and celebrations. 

Our core book for this haf-term is 'Zog' by Julia Donaldson. ​This book has a very repetitive structure which will help us learn to read the book ourselves as we read and re-read it. Zog has lots of rhyming words within the story, as we become more familiar with the story we will begin to listen and pick out the rhyming words. The language is exciting and is helping to extend our vocabulary. This book is about a brightly coloured dragon which links with our theme this half term ‘Sparkle and Shine’.

On Thursday afternoon, we discussed the celebration 'Diwali' and learnt that it is the festival of light. We listened carefully to how Diwali is celebrated and we will be continuing learning about Diwali in the first week back after half-term. 

We then took part in the Diwali Dance Workshop – we listened carefully to the story of Rama and Sita, joined in with actions to the story and then enjoyed putting these actions together to create a short dance routine!

This week our learning has been focussed around “Superheroes” and “Halloween”. We started the week carefully listening to the story ‘Supertato’, we have enjoyed listening to a variety of the books from the series this week as well as watching the newly released episodes at home time! We have also been learning the song “Halloween’s Coming”. 

In our writing area, children have had the opportunity to draw and write what they would put in their cauldron. The Reception children have been working hard to hear initial sounds and to use their Fred Talk to help write the words to go with pictures they have drawn. The children have also had the opportunity to write about what they would do for the day as a superhero – we saw some fantastic writing from the Year 1’s.
In the painting area, children have been creating Pop Art pictures just like Roy Lichtenstein – they stuck to minimal colours and used cotton buds to create Ben Day dots on comic book style pictures!
Our home corner this week was a superhero café – children have been creating superhero masks to wear whilst serving food in the café. They also enjoyed wearing these masks outside to play superhero game.
The water tray, was turned into an orange, spooky potion making station with eye balls, bats and spiders!!

Our funky finger activity this week was to free the superheroes that had been trapped - we think an evil pea may have escaped!!
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Reception children have continued to learn sounds in their groups, please use the links on Seesaw to support your children to learn these sounds at home! In maths, the Reception children have been learning to understand the 5ness of 5. They have learnt a new rhyme “5 Little Peas” – can your child sing you the song?

​In Year 1 Literacy, the children have learnt that the suffix ‘s’ is added to the end of nouns when there is more than one of something. They have also learnt to add the suffix ‘ing’ to the end of the word and know that this is added to show that the action is happening now! We were super clever and were able to write these in our hold a sentence!

​In maths, the children have been learning to identify the previous and next multiple of ten for a given number – they have worked super hard on this. We have practised counting in tens and are really confident at identifying the previous and next multiple of ten when the given number is shown on a number line.

 This week our learning has been focussed around “People Who Help Us”, we started the week on Monday learning about all the different people who help us. 

In our writing area, children have had the opportunity to create a thank you to card to send to someone who has helped them. In the creative area, children have been using their artistic skills to create junk models of emergency vehicles. In the painting area, children have had the opportunity to use powder paints to mix and paint pictures of ‘People Who Help Us’. This week our home corner was turned into a doctors surgery and we had some budding, caring doctors in our classroom as well as some sick poorly patients! In our small world area, there was a police station and children were challenged to build a city for the police to protect. Our funky finger activity this week was to roll a dice and use the tweezers to build a tower!
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Today, we began to explore Christianity.

We learnt that Christians believe in God, the Father and Jesus. We know now that the Christian Holy Book is called the "Bible" and that their special place where Christians go to worship and say prayers is called a "Church".

Today, we had a very exciting morning!  We were very lucky to have the crew in from Premier Care Direct who brought an ambulance with them!
The children are had so much fun learning about what an Ambulance does and how it helps people. 
The children were split into 3 different groups and all groups rotated around the different activities.
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One of the activities was learning how to apply bandages to people who are bleeding. Children learnt that when someone is bleeding we need to look after ourselves by wearing gloves so that we don't get an infection from the person we are treating. The children had lots of fun applying bandages to themselves and the grown ups who were in their groups!

Another activity was learning how to carry out CPR. Children learnt that CPR is needed if a persons heart has stopped bleeding. Children learnt of the important number to ring in an emergency (999) and different scenarios were discussed to check whether they should ring 999 or speak to another person who helps us such as a teacher.  Children also learnt what would happen if they called 999 for fun. Children know that they need to check if a person if responsive by holding their shoulders and shouting their name. They learnt to put their ear to the individuals mouth to check to see if they can hear the person bleeding and that they need to look down at the chest to see if it is moving. Children know how to position their hands together to carry out chest compressions and learnt a second magic number of 30 compression. The children know to keep carrying out compression until help arrives unless they feel tired when they can then take a break. Children KNOW that they can not do CPR on any siblings at home,
Staff in this group also learnt that we should not tickle babies feet as this can send them into shock - class staff were quite shocked to learn this!

The final activity, and the most exciting was going out to the ambulance! Children learnt about the different parts of the ambulance and what they were used for such as the stretcher and wheelchair. Children got to sit in this and were taken up into the ambulance in the wheelchair if they wished to do so! The very best part for the children was to sit in the front of the ambulance, count to 3 and then put the lights and sirens on! 

The children thoroughly enjoyed this enrichment activity and the grown ups in class could see that we have some very caring and helpful children in our class, who would make fantastic doctors, nurses and paramedics when they are older!

In Geography, we recapped last weeks learning on the day to day weather in each season and the names of the countries in the UK. In Science, we have tried really hard to remember the months each season is in. We have also learnt that the hours of daylight get less in Autumn and that the nights get longer.


In provision, children were challenged to draw or create the flags of the countries in the UK. Here is some of our work!

This week our learning has been focussed around “When I Grow Up…”. We started the week by learning about a range of different jobs, after listening carefully to the names of jobs and what these jobs entailed, we had a circle time and every child named a job they thought they would like to do when they were older. We have lots of aspirational children in Team EO! Lots of children wanted to be police officers or firefighters, some children wanted to be doctors and zookeepers and other children wanted to be game testers! 

In provision, children have had the opportunity to draw a picture of the job role they would like when they are older and some children have used their Fred Fingers to write the name of the job they would like. Our home corner, turned into a bakery and there was lots of discussion around what children wanted to order and children were using their mark-making skills to write down these orders. I wonder what our home corner will be turned into next week! In our maths area, children have been taking turns to play an animal version of Connect4. The children have been encouraged to think carefully about what they are making in the creative area, we have used pictures of different junk models for inspiration and we have produced some lovely models

Our funky finger activity challenged use to see how many cheerios we could thread onto spaghetti in 30 seconds – it was tricky to start with but we soon got the hang of it and has been a much-loved area this week. 

​In Literacy we have been writing dictated sentences. For this children say a given sentence after the adult, they say it ‘til they love it to their partner, then we add punctuation actions in the children then help me write the sentence before writing it themselves. In maths, we have been looking at representations of ten, identifying how many tens and ones and saying the number they are equal to using a stem sentence. For example, 3 tens and 4 ones is equal to 34.