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Holgate Primary and Nursery

Holgate Primary and Nursery

F1-nursery

Welcome to Nursery

Key persons that work in Nursery are:

  • Mr Smith (Storm Troopers Group - Class Teacher)
  • Miss Franks (Wizards Group - Teaching Assistant and Forest School Lead)
  • Mrs Billingham (Space Rangers Group - Teaching Assistant in the mornings)

Have a look through our page for ideas and activities on the curriculum we follow and links and guidance to additional resources to enable you to help you to contribute to your child’s learning.

Special Days

Although every day is fun in Nursery, we have some weekly special days:

 Tuesdays - PE  (Please come in suitable clothing and footwear)

Fridays Forest Schools - Please come in wellies, waterproofs and warm clothing (including long sleeve tops)

Learning in Nursery:

The seven areas of learning covered by the EYFS are Personal Social Emotional Development, Physical Development, Communication and Language, Literacy, Maths, Understanding the World and Expressive Arts and design. 

There are three prime areas of learning plus Literacy and Numeracy that are key to achieving a Good level of development at the end of the Foundation Stage.

The 3 PRIME AREAS:

Personal, Social and Emotional Development (PSED)

This area has three smaller sections. These are Making Relationships, Self-confidence and Self-awareness and Managing Feelings and Behaviour. This area focuses on children learning how to work, play, co-operative with others and function in a group beyond the family.

Communication and Language (C and L)

This area has three smaller sections. These cover Listening and Attention, Understanding and Speaking. These outcomes cover important aspects of language development and provide the foundations for literacy. Early Years at Holgate places a strong emphasis on children’s developing competence in speaking and listening and Understanding. During literacy sessions, there is always a strong emphasis in lessons planned in promoting communication and language by encouraging children to share their ideas and opinions and by saying out loud what they want to write prior to writing.

Physical Development (PD)

This area covers both fine and gross motor development and keeping healthy. In order to achieve this as well as weekly PE sessions children are encouraged to use the outdoor environment as much as possible and Forest school sessions are planned to support this.  Weekly child-initiated activities are planned to develop and support fine motor development.  We also do lots of work around healthy eating and looking after ourselves.

The SPECIFIC AREAS:

Maths 

Maths is split into Number and Shape, Space and Measures learning. Maths is taught on a daily basis at Holgate during small group activities as well as being intrinsic to daily continuous provision.  CLIC maths sessions are also delivered on a daily basis to ensure children have the opportunity to learn and consolidate key mathematical concepts and develop key skills.

CLIC MATHS – This session is taught daily to all children in EYFS and the children focus on learning how to recognise, read, write, order and use the numbers from 0-10 and then 0-20. These sessions are fun and practical and involve lots of counting songs such as 5 little ducks and 5 little speckled frogs.

Literacy

Literacy learning is split into Reading and Writing. Literacy is taught on a daily basis at Holgate during small group activities as well as continuous provision.  Children have regular opportunity to explore and understand a range of genres and are challenged to create their own stories and adventures through both written, drama and spoken activities. Children are read with individually on a regular basis to enable them to learn and practise strategies taught. Phonics plays a big part in this area and the ability to blend for reading and segment for spelling are skills that are taught daily in the Foundation Stage at Holgate Primary and Nursery School.

Phonics – Phonics is taught daily in EYFS and the children in Nursery learn a new sound each week and in F2 the children learn 4 new sounds a week. We use the Jolly Phonics sounds and resources to support teaching and learning and materials to support this learning can be found on the Jolly Phonics website.

Understanding the World

This covers the subjects Geography, Science, DT, History, RE and Computing. This is a major area of learning and enquiry focusing on children’s developing knowledge and understanding of their environment, other people and features of the natural and man-made world. Weekly Forest School activities provide an opportunity for children to explore, understand and care for their local environment and understand how it differs from the wider world. Opportunity within continuous provision is provided for children to investigate and understand natural objects and develop scientific curiosity and explanation.  Key vocabulary and skills are taught during weekly group activities and provide children with the strategies to develop their own natural curiosity.  Computing is key at Holgate Primary and children have access to a range of technology such as computers, laptops, talking postcards, bee bots etc. 

Expressive Arts and Design 

This covers art, music, and drama. To ensure a broad range of experiences small group sessions and continuous provision activities are planned on a weekly basis to teach and provide children with skills and opportunity to express themselves creatively in a variety of different ways.  

Throughout the school year, we will work on different Curriculum Vehicles. A vehicle is the theme or idea which drives our learning. Our first Curriculum Vehicle of this school year is called: Run Wild!

Click here to download a knowledge organiser to help support your child throughout this Curriculum Vehicle. This gives you useful information linked to the work that we are doing in class - our vehicle. You will see the areas we will be covering, some “sticky” knowledge that we would like the children to learn, useful books to read and share with your child, key vocabulary and a few ideas of websites to visit. 

It would be really supportive of your child’s learning in school if you could talk to them throughout this half term about the information on here and about what they have been doing in class.

Websites to support learning