Spring Term 1

Week 1

Happy New Year and welcome back! We started our term with a week of Happy New Year with lots of firework work, countdowns, singing and celebrating. We ate a special celebratory cheesecake, played with our colourful scarves and pretended to be fireworks and immersed ourselves into our topic by repetitively acknowledging our key vocabulary for the week supported by pictures and actions.

Week 2

This week, we celebrated Chinese New Year (albeit a little early as you will find with most of our topics this term). We had a great week dressing up, trying Chinese foods, using chopsticks and immersing ourselves into the year of the dragon. Our key vocabulary this week was: Chinese, New Year & Special Day.

Week 3

Happy Valentine's Day! This week has been all about love and we have had a great week with lots of activities centred around this theme. We made a love potion in bucket time, created Valentines cards and focused on our key vocabulary of the week. These were: love, hug, kiss, card, flowers, surprise and present.

Week 4

Pancakes, pancakes, pancakes! We flipped, ate, made, decorated, counted and enjoyed every part of this week. Who knew you could do so much with pancakes? Our attention was particularly peaked when we mixed and created our own pancakes in bucket time. The key vocabulary from this week included words such as: pancake, pancake day, Lent, Jesus, Church and ‘give up’ as our overall theme was exploring Lent.

Week 5

This week in Atlas has been all about the wonderful women in our lives. Our mummies, grannies, aunties and caregivers have truly been celebrated (don’t worry dads, you will get your turn!). We have enjoyed creating cards, producing artwork, celebrating through dancing and singing and using our key vocabulary to cement our learning.

We have also introduced 2 new bucket times into our routine this week – phonics and mathematics. This has been really an excellent addition to our learning and we are hoping to integrate both sessions in daily to extend our day that little bit more.

Week 6

We had a great last week in Atlas celebrating our differences and immersing ourselves into our own Autism Awareness week. We created ourselves in characters, had fun with foot and hand paint printing, writing our names and being able to recognise that we are all different.

Spring Term 2

Week 1

This week signifies our start to Spring which is our overarching theme for the term and to celebrate new beginnings we learnt all about chickens and eggs. We had a really great week where we cooked and ate scrambled and boiled eggs, we made plaster of Paris eggs to be decorated in our Easter week, designed our own 'odd egg', threaded eggs with pipe cleaners and enjoyed being chickens laying our own eggs. What an eggcellent week!

Week 2

We explored flowers this week where our key vocabulary focused on the parts of a flower. We enjoyed flower printing, painting, planting and more. By revisiting prior learning about flowers (from Mother's Day week), we were able to fully immerse ourselves into this theme. 

Week 3

We had a great week learning all about road safety and spring walks in anticipation of our walk to the park next week. The children learnt all about traffic, crossing the road, safe walking and knowing good listening to the adults who are caring for us. We look forward to putting our new skills into practice and will update all of our families on our WOW moments when we have visited the local park.

Week 4

Our theme this week was all about the Woods where we used lots of natural materials to enhance our learning. We made mud pies, looked at and sorted seeds, went on a bug hunt, enjoyed the Gruffalo story (multiple times) and even got out on our local walk to Tamer park. We had a great week with lots of great activities to support our learning of the woods.

Week 5

This week was all about colours in preparation for Holi Festival marking the beginning of Spring 🌼. All of our bucket time activities focused on rainbows and colours. One of our favourite observations was watching the colour melt away from skittles once water was added to the plate they were arranged on. This creates a rainbow on the plate which the children were fascinated by. Our week ended with Holi festival which left us very messy on Friday afternoon. A fantastic colour week!

Week 6

Happy Easter! This week has been full of Easter fun. We have dipped our toes into the story of Easter and have explored the meaning of the cross on Hot Cross Buns, experimented with colours to create colorful eggs, made rice crispy nests and went on an Easter Egg Hunt to find the hidden chocolate treats. 

We hope you have a wonderful 2 week break. Next term is all about the Farm where we will explore farm animals, new smells, machinery and planting.