September 2022...a very warm welcome to Burnley Road Academy Foundation Stage!


Autumn 1 - I am special, I am me!
Autumn 1!
This half term is always busy! We are settling in well and learning all the rules and routines of our wonderful classroom. The children are practising lots of skills such as listening, tidying up, sharing and turn-taking.
Our topic is 'I am special, I am me!'
We have painted self-portraits, looking carefully at what makes us unique such as our eye colour and hair colour. We have also made some lovely family pictures and enjoyed talking with our friends about who is in our family.
We are also learning all about autumn and the changes that occur during this season. We are enjoying collecting yellow, brown, red and orange leaves and finding conkers and acorns. We are learning about what some of the animals do in the autumn such as squirrels, hedgehogs and geese. We are reading autumn stories and learning some lovely autumn songs. Take a look at our lovely autumn displays in the pictures.
Autumn 2 - What a wonderful world!
This is one of our favourite topics! This half term we will look at a globe and explore different parts of our wonderful world! We will begin with England and then move onto hot, dry, cold and wet climates e.g. deserts, rainforests and Arctic/Antarctica. During this topic we will look at similarities and differences in weather, homes, animals and much more.

We have Nursery places available for April and September starters. Children can join our Nursery the term after their 3rd birthday.
If would like to visit, please arrange this by emailing admin@burnleyroad.calderdale.sch.uk or calling 01422 883034.
Spring 1 - Happy and healthy!
This half term our topic is 'Happy and Healthy'. We will be looking at lots of different things that we can do to keep ourselves healthy including our diet, personal hygiene nad exercise. We will use some brilliant 'mixed up fairytales' to support our understanding. These include 'Eat your greens, Goldilocks', 'Give us a smile, Cinderella', 'Stinky Jack and the beanstalk', 'Keep running Gingerbread Man', 'Rapunzel, Rapunzel, wash your hair!' and 'Blow your nose, Big Bad Wolf.' We will also be thinking about how we can keep ourselves and others around us happy.
We are celebrating Chinese New Year too! This year it is the year of the rabbit! We will make our own rabbit hand puppets, Chinese lanterns and practise some Chinese writing. We will also taste some Chinese food and enjoy learning all about the celebrations, including the dragon parade!
Summer 1 - In my imagination
This topic was definitely a favourite! We looked at all things adventure and fantasy and had lots of fun letting our our imaginations run wild!
Our focuses were magic (wizards and witches), turrets and tiaras (kinghts, dragons, princes and princesses), superheroes, and aliens and monsters!
We have also had a brilliant trip to the fire station in Mytholmroyd. We had a tour of the station and the fire engine and we looked at their uniform and the different equipment they use. We even got chance to have a go at using the hose pipe!
Spring 2 - Down on the farm
We have absolutely loved our topic 'Down on the farm'. We learnt about farm animals including their characteristics, their different names, what they like to eat, their young and the produce we can get from them such as eggs, milk and wool. We have looked at the job of a farmer and the vehichles and equipment they use. They have so much to do and work very hard! We created some fabulous art work which is on display in our classroom and we learnt some new songs. We have also looked at life cycles and been very lucky to have our own chick eggs, caterpillars and frog spwan. We have planted our own beans to take home and care for and planted sunflowers during forest school. Have a look at a few photos from all the fun below!
Spring 1 - People who help us
We are very excited about our topic this half term. We started by having a talk about all the different types of people we know who help us. We had some great ideas such as police, shop assisstants, our parents, teachers, doctors, bus drivers and dinner ladies. We have thoroughly enjoyed learning about fire fighters, doctors, nurses, paramedics, midwives, dentists and police so far and have been lucky enough to have some fabulous visitors to tell us all about their jobs and how they help people.
We had a fantastic week celebrating Chinese New Year and the year of the tiger. We now know all about how it is celebrated! We have made lanterns, had a go at Chinese writing, made tigers, role played in our Chinese restaurant, tasted Chinese food and learnt and retold the story of the Zodiac.
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Summer 2 - Our last half term!
This half term we are enjoying our last weeks together and making sure we are prepared for the transitions to our new classes. We are very excited! We are also enjoying lots of fantastic stories which are providing many fun activities. We had a super sports day where ALL the children tried their best, cheered their friends on, joined in and most importantly, had fun!
Science week!
What a fantastic week we had! The children were turned into Scientists and took part in numerous experiments throughout the week including floating and sinking, 'shaving foam rainbow rain clouds', 'jumping cereal' and 'dancing, colour changing milk.' We also took part in our whole school experiment 'can larger hands pick up more sweets?'
Pancake Day!
We learnt all about Pancake Day and how it is also known as Shrove Tuesday. We know the ingredients needed to make pancakes and absolutely loved the story 'Mr Wolf's Pancakes'. We made paper pancake faces and pretended to make our own in the playdough. The best part was of course eating our own with a yummy topping!
We are also really looking forward to our forest school activities this half term. We will start each session with breathing and stretching and then our focus will be 'imaginative play in forest activities'. We will do lots of exploring of our wonderful woodland areas, developing our confidence and independence. We are going to take our teddies on a journey through the woodland. What adventures will they have? We will also use ingredients and follow instructions to make our own natural playdough which we will use to make woodland creatures that live in the forest!
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Autumn 2 - Let's celebrate!
This half term our topic is 'Let's celebrate!'
We will start by talking about Halloween, Diwali and Bonfire Night, using videos, poems, stories and pictures to find out key facts and how these special events are celebrated. We will then learn and talk about other celebrations such as birthdays, weddings and of course Christmas!
Books we are using to support our learning this half term:
The scary hairy party
Aaaarrgggh spider!
10 little monsters
Winnie the witch
Sparks in the sky
Peppa's Diwali
Dipal's Diwali
Cake
Kipper's birthday
Happy birthday Hugless Douglas
The very hungry caterpillar's birthday party
Under the love umbrella
Uncle Bobby's wedding
The scarecrow's wedding
Love makes a family
The Naughty Bus
The sheep that saved Christmas
The dinosaur that pooped Christmas
The jolly Christmas postman
Norman the slug who saved Christmas
Santa Claus needs a wee
Santa comes to Halifax
The Nativity
Fine motor Monday and Friday!
We have introduced fine motor Monday and Friday to our timetable. We provide the children with exciting, well-planned activities to develop their fine motor strength and pencil grip to prepare them for writing.
Power of Reading - The Naughty Bus
Just when you thought one would never come along...
The children thoroughly enjoyed this story and the naughty bus even paid us a visit! We took the bus on lots of adventures, drew maps, role played, retold the story and even created our own buses at the modelling area.
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On Friday 12th November we celebrated Maths Week! Our children made a fantastic effort dressing up as something Maths related and engaged in lots of Maths based activities. We are huge fans of the Numberblocks, do you think we could pass as them!?
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We had a fantastic time celebrating Halloween early at the end of last half term. The classroom was very spooky and the children enjoyed making potions, spiders and yummy chocolate apples! They also practised their fine motor skills by hammering nails into pumpkins and used playdough to make Halloween shapes. We all dressed up and had a spooktacular day!


We love our woodland area and Forest School sessions. How lucky are we to have the canal on our doorstep!
Remembrance Day
The children made poppies to remember the fallen soldiers and held a minute silence. This beautiful animation sees war as experiences by animals in a WW1 battlefield and really helped with their understanding and empathy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv_ub7Be7oA
Christmas 2021!
We are busy practising for our Christmas show...'Our first Christmas play'. We cannot wait to perform it! We are also looking forward to our Christmas party and hopefully a special visitor! The children are busy making lots of lovely Christmas crafts and have been helping to make our classoom feel festive in our special Christmas area.

September 2021. Marvellous me!
This half term it's all about the children settling in and adapting to the routines and class rules. We will be focusing on independence skills and developing confidence. We will spend time talking about ourselves and how we are all different to each other. We will also talk about our families, our interests and our likes and dislikes.
Summer 2 - Everybody out!
Our final topic of the school year! We will be taking a closer look at our environment, exploring living things, looking at life cycles, learning new facts, looking at growth and decay and how to care for plants. Of course we will be getting up close and personal with minibeasts too! The children will be planting their own seeds and will help to look after our outdoor area. They will be introduced to new vocabulary and books, including fiction and non-fiction. We have already planted sunflower seeds and we love caring for them and checking for any changes!

Summer 1 - Once upon a time...
Prepare for lots of stories with this opener!
The children will be focusing mainly on traditional tales such as The gingerbread man, The three little Pigs, Goldilocks and the three bears etc. They will look at how these stories are structured, the characters, settings and plot. They will be able to join in with repeated parts of the story and retell the stories using puppets and story maps/mountains.
Reception:
Phonics - Children in Reception have been taught all of the phase 3 sounds. This term we will be practising using these sounds to read and write. The children will begin to be able to write sentences which are phonetically decodable. We will be focusing on letter formation to make sure that their letters are formed correctly. We will be looking at the phase 4 part of Letters and Sounds document where we begin to look at longer words using all the sounds they have been taught.
Maths -This term we will be really focusing on recognising, writing and ordering numbers from 1-20. We will be looking at numbers to 100 also. We will continue to learn the names of 2D and 3D shapes and the properties of these shapes. The children have learnt how to add by counting on and we will be looking at this again by using bigger numbers. We will also look at subtracting numbers in practical and fun ways.

Reminders...
The last half term...
The final push! For the children in Reception it will be their last half term in our Foundation Stage Unit and we will be preparing for the transition to Year 1. Our Nursery children will also be preparing for the transition to Reception. How exciting!
We will spend lots of time this half term making sure children are prepared and confident for their next step. More importantly, we will have lots of fun! We will continue to embed lots of skills we have learned this past year such as sharing, turn taking, solving problems and conflict, listening, answering questions, following instructions and being super independent!
Nursery
Phonics - Most children will be working hard on blending and segmenting through lots of fun games and activities such as 'golden river', 'metal Mike' and 'I spy'.
Some children will continue to tune into different sounds around them as well sounds at the beginning of words. They will play games such as 'who is on the lycra?', 'Bertha the bus', 'Silly soup' and 'a pizza for...' to practise alliteration.
They will all continue to develop their listening and attention skills during group time, remembering to put their hand up and wait their turn when answering questions or offering comments and show us their beautiful sitting.
Maths - Children in Nursery will work hard to develop a concrete knowledge of numbers. They will recognise numerals, order them, practise matching quantity to numeral, count out different amounts and count objects or actions. They may begin to recognise numerals beyond 10! We will recognise, use, explore and name 2D shapes and use positional language.
Reception
Phonics - In our final half term in Reception we have moved onto phase 4 Phonics. We are working really hard to read longer words and become more fluent when reading. In writing we are trying really hard to write sentences with finger spaces, remembering capital letters and full stops. The children are developing these skills through games, activities and during carpet sessions.
Maths - We are continuing to work on recognising, ordering and writing numbers to 20. We are exploring addition and subtraction in practical ways and writing number sentences. We will continue to explore 2D and 3D shapes.
Nursery
Welcome to our new starters, we are so pleased to have you in our class!
Phonics - The children have been working so hard on various aspects of phase 1 phonics, particularly rhyming and alliteration. We will continue to recap and practise these skills through lots of activities and fun, practical games.
We will also be moving onto 'oral blending and segmenting' and 'voice sounds'. These are 2 very important aspects of phase 1 and will require lots and lots of practise! We have some brilliant games to play to develop these skills and the children will meet our friend 'Metal Mike'!
Maths - This half term we will continue to work hard on our number recognition and counting skills. The children will identify numbers in the environment and during focused group activities. They will enjoy counting out different amounts, match numeral and quantity and order numbers. They will look closely at different numbers and their value. Again, we have some exciting games to play to support them with this! They will continue to recognise, name and describe 2D shapes and use them for different tasks.
Lots of outdoor learning fun to be had too, rain or shine!
March 2021 - Under the sea!
This half term we are diving into the depths of the ocean and learning about all things under the sea! We will explore the different layers of the ocean and learn facts about various sea creatures. (Check out our wonderful display >!) We will also spend lots of time learning the importance of recycling and caring for our environment and wildlife. We recommend the story 'Somebody swallowed Stanley' by Sarah Roberts. The children will be learning lots of new vocabulary surrounding this topic and we hope they will share it with you too!
Nursery children are working really hard during Phonics sessions. We are focusing on alliteration and initial sounds through lots of exciting games and activities. We are also continuing to practise their super listening skills during carpet sessions and remembering to put their hand up. The children will also be developing their counting skills by matching numeral and quantity, counting out a given number and working with 2D shapes.
We are welcoming majority of the Reception children back into the classroom who have been working incredibly hard at home. We have learnt all of the Phase 3 sounds and now we are going to continue to practice using those sounds in words to read and for writing. There are lots of games and activities that you can use to practice this. There are some good websites that you can explore to develop their phonic skills. www.phonicsplay.co.uk , www.lettersandsounds.co.uk , www.twinkl.co.uk. In Maths we are continuing to learn a range of skills such as doubling, counting on, measuring, time, money and problem solving.

January 2021 - Happy and healthy!
This half term our topic is 'Happy and Healthy'. We will be looking at lots of different things that we can do to keep ourselves healthy including exercise and our diet. We will explore different food groups and what the foods do to our bodies. We will also be thinking about how we can keep ourselves and others around us happy. We will also be celebrating Chinese New Year! We will make sure all our activities are available to do at home via Seesaw.
The Nursery children will be continuing to work their way through Phase 1 of Letters and Sounds (Phonics programme). They will be working hard on rhyming words and alliteration. In Maths they will be continuing to learn numbers and the value of different numbers and will practise their counting. They will also begin to recognise 2D shapes.
In Reception, the children have been working incredibly hard on Phase 2 phonics. They have practised reading and writing CVC words and are gaining confidence in writing simple captions. We will be moving onto Phase 3 phonics where we will begin to learn the next set of sounds. In Maths the children will continue to explore numbers to 20. They will begin adding and subtracting numbers using counters. They will also begin naming and describing 2D and 3D shapes.
Autumn 1 - Look at us!
Welcome all our September starters to Burnley Road Foundation Stage Unit! Let the adventures begin!
Mrs Holmes, Miss Brennan, Mrs Greenwood, Mrs Geoghegan and Ms Harrison are thrilled to have you all in our unit.
The children are settling in very well adapting to the routines and class rules. During this half term, we are focusing on independence skills and developing confidence. We will spend time talking about ourselves and how we are all different to each other. We will also talk about our families, our interests and our likes and dislikes.
The children made some lovely pictures of their families which are on display. Take a look >
Autumn 2 - What a wonderful world!
This is one of our favourite topics! This half term we will look at a globe and explore different parts of our wonderful world! We will begin with England and then move onto hot, dry, cold and wet climates e.g. deserts, rainforests and Arctic/Antarctica. During this topic we will look at similarities and differences in weather, homes, animals and much more!
Our wonderful Rainforest display is below!
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Our cheeky 'Elf on the shelf' Christmas decorations and the wonderful ice post box which we were very lucky to have at school! We enjoyed writing letters to Santa and posting them in here. We even had a dance with some elves!
NURSERY PARENTS - Follow this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDtyjM8gsU4&feature=youtu.be to see Miss Brennan go through one of the ways we teach aspects of phase 1 Phonics (rhyming, alliteration and oral blending and segmenting) through a game called silly soup. The children are very familiar with this game and they know the song so it should be an easy one to play with them...fingers crossed!
Please make sure you are pronouncing the pure sounds - here is a guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTe5_Em0BHQ
Check out some of the other videos on her channel to hear her reading stories and singing songs!
RECEPTION PARENTS - Follow this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U7R3wpSs6o&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR19WbhxzC1XBANcYh-VqOxcutqmLHnfOOQ3dwHjdMPRDF599WzLXkHtSeY to see Mrs Holmes reading lots of lovely stories!


100 things to do...
Nursery activities
EYFS Policy
Reception activities
Useful Websites
https://www.onceuponapicture.co.uk/ - Talking prompts
https://www.twinkl.co.uk/home-learning-hub - daily schedule and activities to support
https://app.gonoodle.com/ - Dancing/Wake up shake up!
Playdough recipe
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj0shfH3pzhrf3dOrSj_pRw/ Live dough disco 9.30am and 1pm
https://classroommagazines.scholastic.com/support/learnathome/grades-prek-k.html - Daily stories and activities
https://www.twinkl.co.uk/resource/eyfs-nursery-school-closure-home-learning-resource-pack-t-tp-2549365 - Create a free account for resources and games on Twinkl
https://www.spreadthehappiness.co.uk/product/100-things-to-do-indoors/ - 100 things to do indoors – free download
https://www.youtube.com/user/CosmicKidsYoga - Children’s yoga - they LOVE this!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAxW1XT0iEJo0TYlRfn6rYQ - Joe Wicks live exercise sessions
https://www.vooks.com/ - Video stories
https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/radio - Cbeebies radio
https://theimaginationtree.com/stay-at-home-survival-guide/ - Planning, play and learning ideas
https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/ - Useful ideas and links
https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/games - Cbeebies games
www.discoveryeducation.co.uk – Log in to Espresso using Username
student31016 Password brs2010 and follow the foundation tab
https://theimaginationtree.com/best-ever-no-cook-play-dough-recipe/ - Non-cook playdough recipe
https://domesticsuperhero.com/best-homemade-playdough-recipe/ - Cook playdough recipe