Children will continue to choose the right resources to carry out their own plan when they are initiating their own learning in continuous provision areas. For example, choosing what they need in the creative area when they are designing their own fireworks.

Through topic activities around different festival, children will develop their large-muscle movements to wave flags and streamers, paint and make marks. This will include finger painting, blow painting and paint throwing!

In areas such as our writing and creative areas, children will use one-handed tools and equipment, for example, making snips in paper with scissors, developing their independence, confidence and accuracy.

Now children are settled and familiar with routines and expectations, they will increasingly follow rules, understanding why they are important. Our class visual timetable and visual carpet rules really help the children with this.  It will be expected that children can remember rules without needing an adult to remind them.

Children will continue to learn about five key concepts: print has meaning, different purposes, we read English text from left to right and from top to bottom, the names of the different parts of a book and page sequencing. These key skills will be promoted daily through Literacy and story time sessions, as well as when they are reading books with you at home.

Through daily phonics, children will learn about rhythm and rhyme. This will include learning many different rhymes, copying rhythms and beats and exploring words that sound the same e.g. cat, bat, hat.

Children will also develop an understanding of words with the same initial sound, such as money and mother. We call this alliteration.  Children will take part in activities with objects that all begin with the same sound and play games such as I Spy.

In daily adult led maths sessions children will make comparisons between objects relating to size, length, weight and capacity. They will also explore this in continuous provision areas such as sand and water trays.

Children will compare quantities using language: ‘more than’, ‘fewer than’ and say one number for each item in order: 1,2,3,4,5 as we practise counting objects each day. A key aspect for children to Know, is that the last number reached when counting a small set of objects tells you how many there are in total (‘cardinal principle’).

Children will continue to learn about and apply their knowledge of colour and shape as they take part in different topic based activities from making fireworks to making patterns in malleable trays.

Through our creative activities, children will use all their senses in hands on exploration of different materials and explore collections of materials with similar and/or different properties.  Children will talk about the differences between materials and changes that they notice.  In the creative area alone, they will explore and use many different items from pipe cleaners to sequins and decide how they want to use them.

Children will talk about what they see, using a wide vocabulary, most of which will be learnt through our Celebrations topic.  They will learn about different celebrations from Bonfire night to Diwali, the festival of light.

Closely linked to Understanding the World objectives, children will explore different materials freely, in order to develop their ideas about how to use them and what to make, develop their own ideas and then decide which materials to use to express them. They will also be taught how to join different materials and explore different textures.