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Jackson Class

At Reed First School, Jackson Class covers the period of time the children spend in Nursery and Reception. The class teachers are Mrs Arnott and Mrs Cottenden.  Mrs Browne and Mrs Coutts are our teaching assistants.

We operate a flexible induction programme so that the needs of each individual child can be met.

In our Early Years unit we have created an environment which supports, encourages and stimulates the children to become independent learners.    Our learning is planned with a play based focus and is driven by the interests and needs of each individual cohort.   We follow The Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage and Development Matters (non-statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage) to ensure our planned activities and opportunities for Child Initiated Learning enable every child to reach their full potential and expected outcomes for end of each stage in Early Years.

We also follow Little Wandle Synthetic Phonics Government validated phonics programme and NCTEM maths mastery programme for both Nursery and Reception pupils.

Each week, we have a clear focus through a theme which is always one which is meaningful and relevant to the cohort and focused areas of learning.  These themes are planned specifically for each cohort and so will change year on year but ensure all areas of learning are covered through carefully planned activities and environments.

Below is a copy of our curriculum coverage for the Autumn term 2024.

Early Years Curriculum overview 2024 2025 (398.77KB)

Please also view the class letter for news from Jackson Class at the bottom of this page.

Autumn Term 2024

We have had a super start to the school year with all our new children settling in really well, making friends and becoming familiar with our routines and expectations.

Jackson class children love sharing stories, we have a cosy reading area with three ‘star stories’ each half term selected so children can become really familiar with them and enjoy sharing with their friends without being dependent on adults. Our star stories for Autumn 1 have been We’re going on a bear hunt by Michael Rosen, Elmer by David McKee and Peace at Last by Jill Murphy. For Autumn 2 we have selected Room on a Broom by Julia Donaldson, Freddie and the Fairy by Julia Donaldson and Here We Are by Oliver Jeffers.

We have also based some of our activities around some other favourite books including Owl Babies and Wow said the Owl as we were settling in. We had a couple of weeks where our theme was ‘All about me!’. The children painted self-portraits and drew beautiful pictures of who lives at home with them.

The children loved sharing their ‘All about me’ boxes with their new class. It was so lovely to hear them talk about their favourite and most special things!

Each week two children are chosen to bring in something from home to share for our Show and Tell sessions, we love hearing all about what is special to them and having the opportunity to ask questions!

 

 

We read The Colour Monster by Anna Llenas which is a wonderful book to help children explore their emotions and give names, and more simply colours, to help express their feelings. We introduced our regulation station as a comfortable, quiet place to go if they feel they want to be calm.

 

 

 

With the temperature dropping we are now exploring autumn as our theme enjoying books including books from The Large Family series by Jill Murphy, The Leaf Thief by Alice Hemming and Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert. We are learning new songs about autumn too including ‘Autumn leaves are falling’, ‘I go walking in the trees’ and ‘It’s apple time!’. Children enjoyed finding autumn treasures and sharing them with the class. We have them on display and will continue to add to these and use them in discussions across our areas of learning.

We have been harvesting our own delicious class tomatoes and enjoyed tasting our own grown produce. We have another bumper crop of rhubarb which has been giving us some extra pennies to spend on resources when the children open a stall to parents.

We had such a fun week of learning with an apple week theme! We started by learning about the different parts of an apple. We learnt some songs about apples including “It’s Apple Time” and “5 Little Apples”. We compared the size and weight of apples. We practised balancing apples on top of cardboard tubes. We used pastels to create super observational drawings of apples. The children were able to taste from a selection of varying apples and some children were surprised by how different they tasted! Following a vote about different types of apples we found that the most popular in our class was red apples! We learnt how to peel and chop apples and made a delicious apple crumble!

In Reception maths, we have been subitising 1-3, this means ‘seeing’ the number without the need to count. We have played lots of games including the ladybird game and flower pot game which are great to make ‘seeing’ the number quick and automatic. Please play lots of games at home too as they are so beneficial for all areas of learning from recognising number of dots on a dice, to taking turns and coping with not always winning!  We explore the composition of numbers, the cardinality and ordinality up to 5 and comparison of number and quantity.

In Nursery maths, we have been practising counting 1-5 learning to line up and touch count each item as they say a number, recognising numerals 1-3, subitising (seeing) numbers 1-3 and representing a number on their fingers. We sing lots of songs to help with their mathematical understanding too.

We love to keep the activities fun and active and think of ways to incorporate our learning objectives into their play!

In phonics, we follow the Little Wandle synthetic phonics programme and this term Reception will be introduced to a new letter sound each day, review the sounds they have previously covered, learn how the grapheme and phoneme correspond. The correct letter formation is modelled and the children use whiteboards to practise writing the grapheme. We use the sounds previously learnt to first orally blend to read words then using the graphemes blend to read together.

We are encouraging the children to write their name and have name cards to support them with this. As they learn a new letter sound, we also demonstrate how to form the letter correctly and send them home with a sheet so parents can support their children at home too.

In Nursery we use the Foundations for learning Little Wandle scheme which includes a daily phonics sessions, a weekly deep dive into a book for the ‘love of reading’, and a focus on language introducing a new nursery rhyme each week. Children enjoy playing with sounds in active games including sound discrimination listening to environmental sounds and instruments, exploring body percussion and enjoying rhythm and rhymes.

Child initiated learning is a big part of our timetable and the adults value time with the children observing first their interests and chosen activities then providing questions, suggestions or prompts to scaffold and extend their learning.

For example, in child initiated learning a child brought over to me a paper and parts crafted beetle. He pointed out 4 legs and ‘pinchers’. Together we then looked up more information about beetles on the interactive whiteboard and he was then able to say it was a Stag Beetle and discovered insects have 6 legs, he was able to work out independently he needed to more and went off to make the necessary adjustments!  He was proud to share his model with the rest of the class and inform them all how many legs an insect has which then began a discussion over snack about how many legs other creatures have!

We had a very exciting outdoor assembly when our PCSO Hannah brought the rural Police quad bike and pick-up truck. Children were able to ask questions and continue to forge strong links with our community.

Jackson class children and their parents were invited to come dressed ready for bed for a relaxing bedtime story! The evening was complete with fairy lights, a roaring fire and hot chocolate with marshmallows as we shared some favourite bedtime stories.

Here are some more photos of our Autumn Term!

Spring Term 2024

We started the new year with a super pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk performed for us in our school hall…oh yes it was! This then inspired our play, crafts and writing.

We had some very chilly weather which resulted in some interesting discoveries…
An enormous icicle from our drippy tap, creating tracks on the icy floor and the effects of warm water
on ice!

 

We have also learnt about how Chinese New Year is celebrated and decorated our own classroom making lanterns, tried some Chinese food using chops sticks, looked at traditional Chinese clothes and created a whole class Chinese dragon which we used to perform a dance accompanied by children drumming inspired by videos we had seen.

Summer Term 2024

What a wonderfully busy Summer term we have had!

The warmer weather provides us with new opportunities when learning outside for example exploring colour mixing and being fortunate to collect some frogspawn! We keep it in a tank in our classroom for 8 weeks as we watched the incredible process of change as the tiny black dot grew into a tadpole, then into froglet!  We had lots of healthy froglets which we were delighted to be able to release together back into the village pond.

We have since dug a pond in our nature garden and hope to have our own frogspawn next year!

We have shared many super books to support our topic ‘lifecycles’ each which gave a slightly different focus to extend our learning about lifecycles of a butterfly, frogs and plants.

We have been busy planting beans, sweet peas, sunflowers, tomatoes, squash and many other types of flower seeds, some have been successful but our new school friend Penny the Peahen has been nibbling them!

Our rhubarb has been particularly successful again and provided us opportunities to set up a stall and sell it to parents!

We had a super trip to Church Farm, Ardeley where we had the opportunity to see many farm animals including sheep, goats, alpacas, a bull, cow and calf, pigs with their piglets, turkeys which ‘gobble-gobbled’ to us when we clapped to say ‘Hello!’. We were lucky to be able to hand feed the sheep and feel their soft hairy lips snuffle the food from our palms!

Jackson class were super brave in the chicken coop, where there were hundreds of chickens confident to come up to us and peck at our shoes. We were tasked with the job of collecting the eggs. Some were enormous! We then went to the egg shed and were shown how they were washed and graded by weight in a special machine, then boxed and taken to the shop to be sold. The children were fascinated!

We had a wonderful time honing our gross motor skills climbing up and leaping around on huge hay bales and playing in the woodland adventure play area!

The staff at Church Farm were very impressed with the impeccable behaviour of Jackson class and the interesting questions they asked. What great ambassadors for our school.

We read The Little Red Hen and baked bread rolls together and children made models of the farm animals they had seen. They worked creatively and collaboratively to build a tractor out of loose parts.

We always celebrate the end of the summer term with a summer show. This year it was ‘Dragon Days’ we enjoyed supporting Bysouth and Layton class singing songs and performing a beautiful snowflake dance to The Sugar Plum Fairy music from The Nutcracker. The children so enjoyed learning the songs and wonderful rich vocabularly that we continued our learning about dragons in the class! Mrs Browne brought in her pet bearded dragon ‘Vito’. It was fascinating learning lots of interesting facts about him and even having the chance to stroke him.

We noticed on one of our photos that a dragon had actually been in the background watching our teddy bears picnic – probably wishing they could join in! We went to investigate and look for clues and found an enormous dragon egg! There was no sign of the dragon so we wrote WANTED! Posters with a description and reward. All the children’s effort in writing this year has been wonderful to see as they are now able to apply that knowledge and independently write super sentences!