Cinnamon Brow CE Primary School

Our Role Play area has become an exciting home for lots of wild animals, which we will be learning all about through our key texts this term. We will be reading and acting out Monkey and Me, by Emily Gravett, followed by Jungle Jamboree, by Jo Empson. We will also be exploring how much God loves each one of us, and finding out about how Christians celebrate Easter. 

Please look at these stories and songs together and talk about what is happening with your child?  You could ask questions like, 'What did you like best?' or 'Can you remember what happened in the story?'  Children love acting out stories and you could each take on a different character.   How would that character move?  How would it speak?  Your child will really enjoy learning with you and this will really help support your child's learning in nursery.   

We will continue to teach our FOUNDATIONS TO PHONICS,(see below) alongside the intentional teaching of mathematics following the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum.  We will also continue our very popular 'Helicopter Stories' and 'Word Aware' sessions, which are great tools to aid your child's creativity, improve their language skills and help enhance personal, social and emotional development. We teach maths intentionally and in small groups, supported by 'Sarah Martin Consultancy' and the NCETM. We use Numicon to help support our teaching of number and for ideas of how to support with Numicon at home, click here.

In Nursery, we teach early maths and phonics in small groups each day.  We follow a broad theme for each half-term (see our long term plan), guided by the chidlren's interests and needs, prioritising their communication and language development through quality interactions and opportunities for imaginative play. We follow Little Wandle FOUNDATIONS FOR phonics, enhanced by EY2P materials, Word Aware and Helicopter Story sessions.

Our teaching of phonics consists of seven interlinking parts, which are all vitally important to help your child develop their speaking and listening skills:

1) environmental sounds

2) instrumental sounds

3) body percussion

4) rhythm and rhyme

5) alliteration (words that begin with the same sound)

6) voice sounds

7) oral blending and segmenting

We will be giving you details of how you can support your child's learning, including an invitation to our parental phonics workshop, later on in the year.

There are many ways you can support your child's learning at home.  We have put together a series of little videos to help support you with your child and have produced some documents to help you (see below). 

You can also find useful ideas at:

CBeebies at home

Hungry Little Minds

Tiny Happy People

We hope you find them useful!

INGREDIENTS:  2 cups flour (any type), 1 cup salt,  1  1/2 cups warm tap water,  2tbs cooking oil,  a few drops of food colouring (optional).

Why not add a bit of spice to your dough by adding cinnamon, ginger or glitter? Enjoy making this together!

Remember to use both hands, using language like squeeze, pat, twist, splat, roll.  Why not watch dough disco too!

Making dens is a great way to help develop your child's magination, as well as exercise their gross and fine motor skills.  You can use chairs, clothes maidens/airers and even large boxes to make castles, ships and forts.  What will you create today?