A celebration of learning | Our achievements

EY1 children begin their journey towards writing, not by producing letters and words but by simply making marks. Our environment and activities are planned to help children build the foundation for writing – to develop their whole-body muscles (gross motor), control their upper body and shoulders, and develop the desire to sit still and concentrate. Most of our children are now practising their pencil grip and have started to make marks to communicate meaning. To ensure all children are challenged and build on their existing skills, we provide various opportunities for them to experiment with pre-writing movements, specific movements they will use later when learning to form letters.

EY2 children always notice new resources or provocations when they walk into the classroom. For example, many children explore maths when they play and build towers with blocks. In that one provocation and experience of building, they sort the blocks by size and colour, notice spatial relationships, and develop reasoning skills as they learn which shapes can be placed on top of one another, which ones will topple the tower they have built, and how to combine shapes to create familiar objects. It is beautiful to see the children count or compare objects aloud during their play as they explore patterns and shapes. Regularly we see the children walk to Mr Rosco and say “blue” “circle” they want to share their English without prompting but simply because they want to.

Last week was a special week, as EY3A had their Friendship Exhibition for parents. It was a big day for the children. They worked intensely to plan, prepare and practice it for a month. The event’s main attraction was the variety of the games and activities that the children had prepared to show how we think about friendship. They all worked extremely hard to prepare their areas and get the games ready for everyone to see and to try. Our shared meal was also very popular with the children, as they spent a lot of time thinking about what they wanted to bring in. We had children thinking very carefully about what they could bring and sharing their stories from home about making sure it was safe for the children to use. It shows excellent empathy and the ability to think about others, which is one of the outcomes from this project that we are proud to see. We’d all like to say a big thank you to everyone who came and supported us on this day. 
 

In maths, EY4 children continued with multiplication. We laid out a multiplication table to help children practice multiplication up to 10 playfully. Children need to form a team first and then use Numicon to calculate the result of multiplying the two selected numbers write out the answer to occupy the “territory”. When all the territory is acquired, the game moves into level 2, in which the teams can take other teams’ land by writing out the correct number. We can see which team gets the greatest number of territories in the end.