Within Nursery and Pre Prep we aim for an holistic approach, and therefore the majority of our work is cross curricular. This term our topic is Animals. This is going to be an exciting topic for the children an will cover all areas of the curriculum. The topic will include minibeasts for the first two weeks, followed by three weeks of farm animals. After half term we will be learning about wild animals for the first two weeks, and we will cover pets for the final three weeks of the term. We have a visit arranged for May 10th, when Miller's Ark animals will visit, bringing with them a variety of friendly farm animals for the children to cuddle, stroke, groom and feed. We look forward to hosting our Fun Day on 16th May, our Teddy Bears' Picnic on 7th June, and our annual outing will be at the end of June.

Personal, social and emotional development

This will feature heavily, as the children will be fully involved with the care of the animals that will be visiting during the term, including chickens, snails, baby bottle fed goats & lambs to name but a few!

Communication, language and literacy

We will continue to cover a wide range of rhymes, stories & poems. We will be covering the initial Jolly Phonics sounds and again working as a group, through listening and joining in with the Jolly Phonics jingles.

Mathematical development

This will continue to feature highly within the normal working day and is covered within the topic in numerous ways from group work to individual sessions, thereby covering the needs of the individual child.

Knowledge and understanding of the world

We will be looking at various investigations, experiments and technology, including: incubation; hatching & rearing; making a wormery; creating a ‘living' world, which will involve growing our own landscape within a builders tray for our farm animals; creating a jungle environment; planting ‘jungle' seeds; looking at and investigating water through frozen fish; and investigating and creating a desert. The children will continue to plant seeds and care for the seeds planted last term; we are hopeful for bumper crop this season!

Physical development

Nursery & Pre Prep continue with weekly PE and Music & Movement sessions following our very popular action & bean bag raps - the children delight in showing off their hip movements!

Gardening continues to form a large part of our regular physical activity, as do the regular walks and visits to the woods and the adventure playground.

Creative development

There will, as usual, be many new experiences for the children. They will be involved in creating the many different animal displays, as well as individual displays within the classrooms. They will experience using natural fleece, donated kindly by Mrs Spooner's pet sheep, Bella! They will use a variety of paint mixes, create crocodiles from eggshells and produce numerous animals from dough, clay and mod rock. Cookery sessions will continue to produce exquisite gourmet delights including Butterfly cakes, snail savouries, apple turnovers, chocolate brownies and fruit salads, to name but a few.

It is emphasised that the above is offered as a guide only, and the school retains the flexibility to adapt its schemes of work to the needs of the individual or the class.