A look at our 2023 autumn term

Exploring Books

Exploring books through play encourages early literary skills, where the children naturally discuss characters, predict story settings and join in with repeated refrains.

This term, we have set up tuff tray activities to enhance the children’s learning. We have been on a bear hunt. This encouraged descriptive language, which included splash splosh and squelch squerch and positional language over it, under it and through it.

Don’t put your finger in the jelly Nelly was a firm favourite where the children got to explore the different food textures and join in the rhyming words.

What the Ladybird Heard encouraged animal sounds, which promotes early speech and discussion about the farm, what the animals live in and children spoke about visiting a farm.

Children love malleable play, so with this in mind, we decided to make bread and include the Autumn theme of hedgehog shaped rolls; this was an opportunity for all the children to understand the process of bread making, from mixing to kneading to watch how the bread grows. We used the 5 minute sand timers, so the children were involved in timing each part of the process. They all had their own dough to knead which they manipulated into hedgehogs and used scissors to create the spikes.

Some of the children have brought in natural resources that they have collected. These have been used to print and paint apple trees and collages.