Nightingale class information.

Welcome to Nightingale class! We are named after the inspirational woman 'Florence Nightingale'- also known as the 'Lady with the Lamp'. She was the founder of modern nursing who helped care for soldiers during the Crimean War.

Top 10 Florence Nightingale Facts.

1. Florence Nightingale was born to a wealthy family on the 12th May 1820.

2. She was named after the place of her birth: Florence in Italy.

3. She lived in Derbyshire and Hampshire and she died in 1910.

4. Florence Nightingale was a nurse and she saved the lives of many soldiers during the Crimean War (1854-56).

5. She was dedicated to her profession and she worked hard day and night. She became known as the Lady with the Lamp as she carried a lamp to check on her patients throughout the night. 

6. She met Queen Victoria in 1833 when she was awarded the Royal Red Cross medal. 

7. She was the first-ever woman to be accepted into the Royal Statistical Society. 

8. Every year on the 12th of May, nurses celebrate International Nurses Day. This is held on Florence Nightingale's birthday!

9. She opened a nursing school and wrote a book called 'Notes for Nursing.'

10. King Edward VII gave Florence a special award called the Order of Merit in 1907.

She was the first women to receive this award and she changed the way that women were seen in the workplace.

About us

Our teacher is Mrs Davies and Mrs Webb supports the children with their learning.

Children who begin their time at Thomas Eaton in our Pre-school or Reception Class are welcomed as part of our school from the very beginning. Parents are welcomed too and we pride ourselves on our good relationships with children and their families.

Our experienced and dedicated Early Years Team work closely together through Pre-school and Reception to ensure children are given the best educational start and develop a life long love of learning.

We benefit from having small class sizes in Early Years, giving teachers the opportunity to get to know their pupils extremely well; observe how they work and embrace their next steps in learning. Teachers get to know each child personally and make a positive contribution to their early development.

Learning in the Early Years (particularly in Pre-school) is play based. There are untold benefits of child led learning including the development of intellectual skills, thinking and motivation. Play encourages language skills, supports pre-literacy skills, develops social and emotional skills and fosters creativity and imagination.

Children will also work in small groups to further develop number, mark making and writing, phonics, art, fine motor and speech and language skills.

Teachers plan to develop children’s curiosity and interest in learning and risk taking is encouraged to give children the opportunity to be resilient and brave learners. 

Our outdoor space is used throughout the year and the freedom of this learning environment sees language skills thrive and discovery and inquiry skills develop. 

Reading expectations.

Frequently sharing books with your child and talking about the main characters and sequence of events will support your child to develop their comprehension skills. Visiting the local library is a great way to find a wide variety of books that link to your child’s interests. Please ensure that you support your child to read their phonic book for at least ten minutes five times a week. After reading, please record an entry in their reading diary including the date, the name of the book and a signature from the adult who has read with them. You may also want to comment on whether your child enjoyed the book, if they found it easy or difficult, or use it as an opportunity to ask your child’s class teacher a question. The number of reads will be counted up at the end of every week, so it is important the children have their reading diary and their books with them each day. Whilst reading, encourage your child to point carefully to each of the words. Please ensure they are reading the words from left to right using their phonic knowledge to decode words. Remind children of everyday words (those that they cannot sound out but just have to know on sight) and encourage them to discuss what they have read.

Happy reading!

Home Learning Tips and Advice:

Reading

When listening to your child read, encourage them to point to each word as they say them, to help develop one to one correspondence. Encourage your child to use the pictures to help if they are stuck on a word and help them to sound out the word using the phonemes they have been learning in phonics. Remember to use 'pure' sounds for each phoneme, avoiding adding on 'uh' after each sound. For example, 's' is pronounced 'ssss' rather than 'suh' and 'm' is pronounced 'mmm' rather than 'muh'. If your child takes a while to read a sentence, reread it back to them before moving on to the next page (whilst pointing to each word), so that the meaning of what they have read is not lost or forgotten. After reading, ask your child to retell the events of the story and answer some comprehension questions. If your child is not enjoying the book or is struggling, leave the activity and come back to it later.

We want to develop a love of reading in our children, not for it to become a forced practise. Encourage your child to spot words on signs, around your house and in magazines, recipe books and newspapers. When you are reading a bedtime story, have your child look out for and count all the everyday words they can find, or have them search for a particular word on a page. 

Writing

When your child is completing a written task, e.g. writing a sentence, encourage them to first decide what they are going to write in full. Have them say this sentence out loud in their normal voice, a silly voice, a quiet voice and a loud voice. This repetition will help the order of the words stick in their mind when they come to write it down. Remind your child that a sentence must begin with a capital letter and that they should use finger spaces, a full stop at the end of the sentence and to try and keep their writing as close to the line as possible. Finally, after writing the sentence, have your child read the sentence back to ensure it makes sense. When your child is writing, allow them independence in sounding out words before writing them and encourage the use of phonics. Even if their spelling of a word is not technically correct, if it is phonetically plausible, allow this. For example, 'yoonikorn' would be an excellent attempt at 'unicorn' and one that we would celebrate in Reception for the use of the phonemes. Finally, encourage your child to form their letters correctly, starting in the correct place for each one (an example of this can be found below.

Maths

In maths, the emphasis is on developing a solid understanding of number and pattern and less on writing down numerals and number sentences. The principle of 'concrete, pictorial, abstract' representations of number is key to developing this understanding, with children first creating a concrete representation of a number through building a tower or model using the specific number of bricks/counters. Next, the children would then be encouraged to draw the number, creating a pictorial representation of four rabbits/four flowers/four cars etc. Finally, and only once the first two steps were completed, would the children be asked to write the abstract representation, in this case the numeral. Maths Mastery methods are an excellent way of helping your child to develop a strong understanding of number and pattern, focusing on talking about number and pattern, explaining how something is known and how the child came to the answer they did. In all maths based activities, ask your child 'how do you know?' after they tell you an answer.

The Characteristics of Effective Learning

The characteristics of effective learning are important learning behaviours that we support the children to develop throughout the Reception year. They are split into three categories:

Playing and Exploring - Engagement:

Can I do this?

Active Learning - Motivation:

Do I want to do this?

Below you will find a useful website to explore the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the importance of developing a growth mindset. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/grownups/help-your-child-try-new-things

Creating and Thinking Critically - Thinking:

How do I do this? 

We can help children to become effective learners by playing with them, listening and responding to them, acting as a sound board, supporting them to pursue their own interests, inspiring them, modelling discovery learning and both guiding and supporting them.

The following website gives families ideas of activities as to how they can support their child from home too.

Learning to talk | 3 to 5 years | Start for Life (www.nhs.uk)

Fun at the seaside.

We have looked at seasides from the past and the difference between beach visits of today to those in Victorian times. We talked about the difference in swim wear, activities we could enjoy at the beach and the clothes worn in past and present. We have created sea collages and made sandcastles in the sand tray.

-Summer 2-

Our topic for the final half term of the year is 'Fun at the seaside'. 

We will be discussing our holidays and seaside experiences and enjoy a range of texts related to this for example 'The lighthouse keepers lunch' 'Lucy and Tom at the seaside' and 'Tiddler'. We will be singing sea shanties and basing some of our work on pirates. We will be sending messages in bottles and follow and create our own treasure maps. We will be studying seasides long ago and differentiate between land and water.

-Summer 1-

Our topic this half term is 'World Explorers'. We will be reading books focussing on countries and cultures from around the world such as 'We're going on a lion hunt' and stories which focus on travel such as 'Mr Gumpy's outing' and 'The naughty bus'. We will be tasting foods from different origins and experience African dancing. We will be discussing our journeys to school and the modes of transport used, as well as creating maps of these journeys and programming Bee-bots to follow our route to school.

-Spring 2-

Our topic this half term is 'Food, glorious food'. We are learning where our food comes from, how plants are grown and the different types of food we eat and enjoy.

We began our topic by reading 'The tiny seed'. We learnt how seeds grow and change, before making our own flowers in the style of Eric Carle. We decide what shapes to use and cut these independently.

We have planted cress seeds and we are taking good care of them. We are keeping seed diaries and measuring them weekly to gauge how much they have grown.

We know that birds like to eat seeds, so we have designed our own scarecrows and made a class one together. We have named her Rosie and she currently lives in the Reception outdoor area, doing her job of scaring away the birds!

We made pitta pizzas by spreading the sauce and sprinkling the cheese. We enjoyed watching the changes made through cooking, however our favourite part was definitely the tasting! 

We have been on a 'spring walk' to look for seasonal changes and recorded these ourselves with the Ipads.