We plan a range of experiences to ensure children gain cultural capital by attending our setting.

After watching Sealegs Puppet Theatre at school in November, we visited Theatre Severn this week to watch an exciting performance of Dear Santa!

It was filled with music, songs and magic! The children were enthralled by the props, lights and actors. They listened and attended for a long period of time and joined in with nursery rhymes and actions.

We had studied the story by exploring the book, presents and used the theme of toys to develop our pre-phonics learning of environmental sounds. It is also an innovation of Dear Zoo which is one of our core texts.

“My favourite part was the cat!”

“The elf was hiding!”

“Santa sent something else.”

A particular highlight for some of the children was the journey on the minibus. They chatted about the, “huge lorries” and, “high bridges” they observed on the way there.

Our curriculum is sequenced in a way which ensures children are given time to practise, layer their understanding, make connections and apply their learning to new contexts.

Our learning about babies has helped our Religious understanding of the Christian story of the first Christmas.

Stories are at the core of everything we do. We have listened to versions of the story in books, films and through images and artistic interpretations as well as through small world story-telling, puppets and role-play.

We had a visit from Becky Dotson who is a Christian herself. She helped us to explore the story through song. We loved it because it was an innovation of our reading spine book, ‘We’re Going On a Bear Hunt.”

Everything we do is for a reason! We were inspired to draw the Baby Jesus in his manger and used these as our Christmas Cards for our families.

The children also applied their knowledge about faces, from last term. Check out those eyelashes and nostrils!

We have been learning about babies as part of an Understanding of the World project.

We have analysed objects, looked at baby photographs, learnt songs, nursery rhymes and explored a variety of books about babies.

We now know a range of vocabulary and concepts linked to this.

“When I was a baby I went in a pram because I couldn’t walk.”

“I was a baby a long, long time ago.”

“Babies need a high chair or they would fall off!”

“A crib like rock a bye baby.”

“I’m a child. I have a cup not a bottle.”

Today we had an expert visitor, a real baby visit the setting. We noticed the size of the baby, it’s clothing and the things it needed. We told his mummy what we knew and asked whether the baby drank from a bottle or had a nappy. We sang it a lullaby.