Nursery Summer

Nursery Curriculum Newsletter Spring 2025

Joy Excellence Service “As soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.”

Luke 21:30-31

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION Our themes for the Summer term are "To the ends of the Earth" and “Dialogue and encounter”.

The first half term, we will focus on talking about Jesus going back to His Father, we will introduce the Holy Spirit and its role of looking after us. We will talk about the importance of the places where we meet our friends to sing and pray on Sundays, our parish church. In our final topic we will be looking at how other people see Jesus and how they feel they friends with him as well as exploring different images of Jesus from different places in the world.

RSHE ln the Summer term, our RSHE lessons focus on the theme of "Love".

Children will come to understand that as we are made in the image of God, we are designed to love God and love one another too. Children will begin to consider their wider communities.

Children will learn that our loving actions can be used by God to do incredible things. They will also begin to understand the responsibilities they have to people, places and the planet now and increasingly as they get older.

COMMUNICATION AND LANGUAGE We will continue to develop children's communication and language through our story times, songs and rhymes sessions. We will learn stories that are accompanied by Makaton signs, which will help to embed key vocabulary. The adults will support the development of language through focused interactions during child initiated learning time. We will be taking some time to explore more Story dough activities to work on vocabulary and story telling.

PERSONAL, SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT ln the summer term, we will continue to support the children as they become more independent learners and build their relationships with adults and their peers. We will be learning about the importance of healthy eating as we grow some of our own healthy food in our garden. The children will get the opportunity to taste different fruit and vegetables that they may not have encountered before. We will also spend sometime talking about the importance of oral health as we share some good practice. The children will be brushing their teeth every day after lunch in Nursery. They will develop awareness of the importance of how to looks after their teeth and also the skills of become independent at getting their things sorted.

PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT For our final term this year, we will continue our learning through the "Write Dance" programme. For gross motor skills, we will be focusing on hand and foot ball skills, including throwing, catching and passing the ball. We will also be teaching the children a range of skills to prepare them for our Nursery Sports Day. Everyday, we provide opportunities for the children to improve their fine motor skills through activities like stretching rubber bands over geoboards, using large tweezers to pick up pompoms and manipulating pegs. The children will do a range of activities to advance their scissor skills too.

LITERACY During the Summer term, Nursery children will work on different stories, part of our NELI program, that will support their vocabulary and story telling skills. The children will be getting familiar with other types of writing such as poetry exploring poems and rhymes.

The children will have lots of opportunities to sequence stories, recalling the main points and retelling them in their own words.

We will encourage the children to orally retell the stories by setting up role play areas and small world play themed around our focus texts. We will encourage children to take part in early writing and mark making in their play in a variety of ways. Some children will start recognizing some letters have a go at writing them.

PHONICS This term, we will focus on the ability to hear different sounds between words. We will continue looking at alliterations to develop the understanding of initial sounds. This will also encourage children to explore how different sounds are articulated. Finally, we will begin to develop oral blending and segmenting of sounds in words. The children will practise listening to phonemes within words and attempt to remember them in the right order. We will be playing games such as silly soup.

MATHEMATICS ln maths, the children will practise identifying 1 more and 1 less and learning about number composition. We will be also exploring shapes by finding them all around us. Through outdoor learning, we will build on their understanding of full and empty providing opportunities to explore capacity with different materials and compare capacities in various containers. The children will explore measuring time by discussing daily routines and the differences between day and night. Our final topic will be positional language as the children rehearse using the correct phrases to describe where something is.

UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD The children will learn all about plants and growing through first hand experiences. They will plant some flowers and vegetables in our garden and we will learn how look after them. We will use the vegetables for cooking and learn about healthy eating. They will also find out about the important roles mini beasts play in helping our plants to grow. Hopefully, they will find lots of mini beasts in our bug hotel! We will be learning about life cycles too with particular focus on butterflies as we will be getting caterpillars to observe them develop. Through caring for the plants and animals, the children will develop a love and respect for nature around them and the ways we work together to take care of each other and our world.

EXPRESSIVE ARTS AND DESIGN This term, our focus is will be learning about Georgia O'Keefe. We will look at her paintings of flowers and learn how to fill the page with our drawings. The children will produce their own flower paintings. We will also study Hokusai and Hockney's paintings of nature and begin to use artistic language to talk about our opinions on famous pieces of art. We will continue to teach and practise songs and nursery rhymes. The children are always encouraged to sing their own songs and performing using instruments and ribbons.

TRANSITION

For the children who will be moving up to Reception in September, we will prepare them for school with various activities. We will look at the new uniforms they will be wearing in Autumn. We will share stories with them about starting school and changes. Those going to Our Lady of the Rosary in September will have several visits to the Reception classroom. The Reception teachers will come and spend time with them in Nursery too, so that the children can get to know them and feel comfortable around them. The children can write letters to their new teachers talking about themselves and asking questions.

JOY EXCELLENCE SERVICE