Pre-School - Hedgehog Class

Welcome to Hedgehog Class

Class teacher: Mrs Bolt

Teaching assistants: Chloe, Becky and Rebecca

 

This year, we have a wonderful, light,airy and engaging environment for the children to play, learn and explore in. We have lots of exciting new resources for the children to share and a wonderful new interactive whiteboard to enhance learning opportunities. Our continuous provision -the space where they use and explore independently, provides the children with endless opportunities to develop their skills in each of the seven areas of the EYFS.

Children in pre-school learn through:

Three characteristics of effective teaching and learning.

• Playing and exploring- children investigate and experience things, and 'have a go'
• Active Learning- children concentrate and keep on trying if they encounter difficulties, and enjoy achievements
• Creating and thinking critically- children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas, and develop strategies for doing things.

We have created lovely, calm areas to explore mark -making and our senses as well as purposeful zones to further develop specific skills.

Term 4 in Pre-school

Our Feelings and Emotions

This term we are going to focus on our emotions, feelings and how our own actions can affect other children’s feelings.  Personal, social and emotional skills are so important in the Early Years and we understand that there is so much to learn. We need to work out how to share resources, toys and adults as well as learning to self-regulate and recognise what’s making us feel the way we do. As we welcome new children to the pre-school it allows the older children opportunities to model how to share, be kind and turn take.

We will be using some fantastic and funny stories to help the children relate to their emotions and feelings. We will start the term off with ‘When Cookie Crumbled’, then, ‘Ice Cream had a Meltdown’, 'When jelly had a wobble' and finally, 'Simon Sock'.  These stories will allow us to talk about the characters and events and who did what to make someone feel a certain way.

Throughout the term, we will provide the children with lots of opportunities to engage in role play, small world dramatic play, messy tuff tray activities, turn taking games with adults and children. Our continuous provision allows the children to freely and independently choose where they would like to play, which areas they want to explore and how they choose to use resources available to them. The adults will carefully add enhancements and additional resources to enable the children to make links to the characters in the stories that we share across the term.

We are also going to revisit Elmer the Elephant to see how he celebrates ‘Holi’, the festival of colour with his friends in the jungle. We often talk about how unique Elmer is and how different he is from the other elephants so it’s a lovely way to celebrate just how individual and unique we all are whilst having fun with paint and colour.

Mrs Bolt and the Pre School Team