2025-26

Curriculum Newsletters

Nursery Spring 1 - Curriculum Newsletter

Nursery Autumn 2 - Curriculum Newsletter

Nursery Autumn 1 – Curriculum Newsletter

Week Beginning 12th January 2026

This week has gone so quickly ‘Oh no it hasn’t’. Sorry I am writing this after enjoying the magnificent pantomime Aladdin that we watched with the children. The nursery children were a real credit to us with their incredible sitting and listening throughout the performance. It was an event thoroughly enjoyed by all who attended and we look forward to seeing another one next year.

This week we have had a book focus on ‘There is a dragon in your book’. We talked about dragons being ‘mythical creatures and the children have taken part in so many fun activities, such as creating tube dragons, describing dragons and mixing coloured to create flames.

During our structured play activities the children have started participating in ‘Write dance’ sessions to develop the gross and fine motor skills. If you would like to have a try at home follow this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKf0n8f1kr8. We have also been learning the rules for the game ‘duck duck goose’. The children enjoyed playing with their friends and taking it in turns to be the goose. 

Our maths this week has continued our learning about numbers to 3, including counting actions such as jumping, moving fingers as we count and using numbers as labels to identify how many are in a set of objects. To help at home with this you could create a picnic of tea party with some ‘teddy’ or dragon friends and count out the correct number of plates, biscuits and cups for all the attendees. 

During our whole class sessions the children are developing their listening skills to try and identify sounds that are the same and different. If you have instruments at home try to make two sounds and encourage the children to identify if the sound is ‘the same’ or different. 

Week Beginning 5th January 2026

Welcome back and we hope everyone had a happy new year.

WOW what a start to the week! To say it was cold is an understatement but we have had lots of excitement watching the snow fall and seeing it start to settle on the playground and equipment. 

The children are buzzing to begin our new topic with our focus story 'There is a bear in your book'. The books are interactive and the children enjoyed listening and joining in. Within the book the main character of bear is getting ready for bed; we have talked about bedtime routines including brushing our teeth. The children have used brushes to clean duplo teeth and remove all of the 'playdough food' as well as talking about visiting the dentist. 

We have been very impressed by what the children have remembered from our bears topic and they were able to recall some of the learning we had previously done; recreating scribble bears and bear headbands to wear.

During our maths sessions the children have been encouraged to show 1, 2 or 3 fingers in different contexts as well as counting 1, 2 or 3 objects. If you wanted some activities to support this at home we would recommend singing the rhymes 'Tommy thumb', 'Two Little Dicky Birds' or  Three Blind Mice.

Week Beginning 15th December 2025

How have we completed a term already? The children have made us all so proud with the progress they have made this term. From learning the new routines, listening rules and taking part in a carol concert on stage it has certainly been action packed. 

Monday was a very busy and Christmas-filled day! It was our Christmas Jumper Day where adults and children dug out our most festive Christmas jumper to accompany our Christmas Lunch. The children thoroughly enjoyed wearing their Christmas crowns and listening to music while eating their lunch. We talked about the foods we eat at home over the festive period.

We have had a really lovely and relaxing week this week in Nursery after the brilliant chaos of carols last week! The Christmas activities and crafts are still rolling with children creating their own cards for friends, melted snowmen and reindeer antlers. 

They have been drawing and talking about their wish lists for Santa as well and thinking about the importance of being kind throughout the year.  The children have been making incredible progress with the foundations for phonics; thinking about what sound items such as socks, apples, taps and insects begin with and they are becoming increasingly accurate with this. 

We hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and rest ready for more learning in the new year.

Week Beginning 8th December 2025

WOW! What a week it has been. We have achieved so much this week and are so proud of everything the children have done. 

We have to begin by speaking about out carol performance. I think you will agree that the children were fabulous performers and they loved every single second of being on stage. They put in so much hard work learning the songs  to make the performance such a success.  We hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed creating and performing for you all. 

Thank you so much to all the family and friends who came to watch and join us in the nursery for stay and play after the performance. The children really do thrive on being able to share their learning and achievements with their loved ones. 

Christmas has well and truly arrived in the nursery with decorations being created, Christmas crafts flowing and the glitter is pouring! 

This week the children are being encouraged to use all the skills they have been learning throughout the half term to create drawings and talk about the images they have created. In maths we have been continuing to look at repeating patterns and counting objects to 3. 

During structured play the children have been exploring lots of different Christmas stories; talking about family traditions and routines they enjoy at Christmas. The staff have also been informed of what each child would like for Christmas. 

Week Beginning 1st December 2025

There is a real fizz of excitement in the air in Nursery as we get ready for beginning Christmas celebrations. We have been a hive of activity learning our carols; the children have been practising with such enthusiasm. Oakridge Nursery's very first carol performance will be next week Thursday 11th December 1.30pm. We truly cannot wait for you to see all the hard work, sparkle and joy the children have when singing.

You may have noticed that in our creative area the glitter has well and truly come out of retirement ready to start some festive creations such as Christmas cards for family members, decorations and maybe a little surprise or two.  Have a look at the windows if you walk through the playground and you will be able to see some of our creations on display already.

At the writing table the children are working on drawing continuous lines to create baubles, candy canes and Santa's sack. We have also been using all the writing patterns we have learnt so far to decorate baubles.

As a celebration of our own we printed lots of photographs of the children from the Nursery year so far for the children to look at and talk about. They were able to talk about what they could see in the picture and had remembered lots of the activities they had completed.

Week Beginning 24th November 2025

WOW! What a week it has been! We have achieved so much this week and are so proud of everything the children have done!

We have been delving into the book "Which food will you choose?" It looks at food of all different colours and encourages children to explore different food. To support this we have a 'talking table' with a variety of familiar and unfamiliar fruits and vegetables. At the start of the week the children were only able to look at them and were encouraged to talk about what they could see. The children were supported to respond in sentences trying to describe and name the food in front of them. We then used our sense of smell to smell the food to decide if we thought we might like to try it. Finally the children were able to touch and try the food they felt comfortable exploring. Many of the children tried new things and even enjoyed much of what they tried including beetroot, pomegranate, butternut squash and lemons.

We continued with our nursery rhyme 'Miss Polly had a Dolly' and the children enjoyed listening for syllables within words and changing the names of characters to 'sing it silly'. We had also been learning some of our Christmas songs in preparation for the upcoming carol performance.

In the creative area the children have been creating their own food related crafts, designing a pizza, printing with fruit and creating our own rainbow salads. We are developing our confidence in mark making to create zig zags, curves and lines to create images of different fruits. Some children have also been drawing the fruit bowl full of fruit with lots of detail thinking about the colours they need to use.

The children have been extending their role play skills this week taking on different roles. At the beginning of the week we had a shop set up for the children to buy food, take it to the kitchen and 'cook'. By the end of the week we had some take away restaurants set up for the children to order food, pay and then take it to the home corner to enjoy.

Week Beginning 17th November 2025

We have been busy bees with practising our rhyme of the week this week Miss Polly has a dolly. The children have been very excited to take on the role of doctor or patient during our doctor role play and have worked together to look after our sick baby Polly. During structured play the children all had their own sick soft toy that they needed to look after and apply bandages to their legs and arms.

Our focus story this week has been 'Daisy eat your peas'. The children have been talking in their groups about meal times at home and have been role playing in the kitchen together. They were encouraged to cook a meal, lay the table, eat together and then role play washing up their dishes. I wonder who can help with this routine at home?

We continue to work on our fine motor control and during structured play the children used knives and forks to cut play dough food such as sausages, pie and pizza. 

Throughout the week the children have been trying to spot 1, 2 and 3 and the different ways it  can be represented such as with numicon, dice or using our fingers. 

Our 'Be Bright Be Seen' mufti day was a huge success and thank you to everyone who participated. Below is a link to some road safety games and videos you could look at together,

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/z62nxyc 

Week Beginning 10th November 2025

We have had another super busy week. On Tuesday we spent time remembering and talking about the brave soldiers who fought to keep our country safe. We created poppies using lots of different materials including paper, paint and small parts in remembrance.

Our focus story this week has been The Little Red Hen and the children have been telling the story using actions. They have been thinking about how bread is made and what we can do to help people. 

This week we have been using the Makaton for 'who' and learning to ask and answer 'who' questions. 

Our maths sessions have consisted of the children beginning to order some number names in their play but singing a variety of number songs such as 5 little ducks. 5 speckled frogs and 1 2 3 4 5 once I caught a fish alive.

Week Beginning 3rd November 2025

Welcome back for another fun filled half term. This week we have started our food and celebrations topic. We started the week with activities loosely linked to Halloween then went onto bonfire night and fireworks themed activities.

Outside, we cracked open plenty of pumpkins, discussing their textures, smells and using rich vocabulary to describe them - a wonderfully sensory experience. As well as this we explored being creative with our bodies to make firework dances, popping and banging to create explosive movements. Inside we explored making marks using lots of different medium to create firework pictures such as chalk, silver pens, paint and colouring and sticking pasta. While enjoying the colours and sounds fireworks make we also talked about the importance of being safe near fire and fireworks and what we need to do to stay safe.

Our focus nursery rhyme this week is Humpty Dumpty and the children really enjoyed making silly versions of the rhyme by changing it to include our own names. 

During our daily maths we have been hearing and saying number names; joining in with number rhymes and saying some number names in order. This has been followed by exploring number rhymes on the maths table using small props and singing to our friends as well as counting the blocks we use as we build.

 

Teddy Bear Picnic - Stay and Play Session 

Teddy Bear Picnic - Stay and Play

Thank you once again to all who attended the stay and play session. It was a lovely opportunity to speak with you all and share all of the children's successes and learning from this half term. The stay and play focus was on the area of learning known as communication and language; this encompasses listening, attention & understanding and speaking. We started the session in the infant hall going through the expectations and typical skills children would show at different ages and what we could be doing at home to help our children move to the next stage in their development. We also talked about screen time, its impact on speaking and the recommended guidance. A PDF with the key information can be found on the website. We then went into the nursery where the children were able to show the parents around and talk them through activities linked to the skills we had been learning this half term. The children were very confident in talking about what they had learnt using much of the key concepts and vocabulary we have been practising this half term. They made bear bread, identified patterns using coloured bears, created 'scibble' bears using circular arm and pencil movements and created bear faces with loose parts.

The EYFS team are very proud of the children's progress this half term and the way that they were able to show their independent and communicate their learning.

If you missed the session or would like any further information about what was shared please come and speak to one of us.

Week Beginning 20th October 2025

What a wonderfully busy week we have had in the nursery this week. How have we finished the first half term already? We have begun to explore some celebrations that are celebrated from around the world. This week we have been exploring Halloween; carving pumpkins, decorating and designing spooky patterns, creating potions practising our tipping and pouring skills.

Our fine motor focus this week is making zigzags to complete pictures such as pumpkin mouths, mazes and mountains.

Week Beginning 13th October 2025

This week in nursery the children have been working in their key groups to create their own versions of 'We're going on a bear hunt'. It has been a busy and bear filled week this week. We have been exploring lots of natural resources within our key groups to make our own picture books based on our story of the week 'We're going on a bear hunt'. We used lots of resources to explore the story using lots of sensory experiences. We retold the story in our own words using the small world tray, created our own thick oozy mud paint and splashed in the water during our outside time.

Week Beginning 6th October 2025

This week at nursery we have been enjoying some space exploration through our focus story 'Whatever next'. The children have been taking on the role of baby bear; donning our colander helmets, space boots and a teddy bear climbing into our box rockets and zooming to space. At the maths table we have been exploring repeats; repeated phrases in nursery rhymes and repeated colours or shapes in patterns. We have also been using shapes to create pictures this week such as rockets, stars and of course bears.
The children enjoyed spending time at our talking tables and they are being encouraged to speak in full sentences and respond to their friends' ideas.

Week Beginning 29th September 2025

This week at nursery has certainly flown by. We started the week with an exciting visit from the fire brigade who flashed their lights and played their sirens. You may have also heard the children say that they have been making Christmas cards. This is true. They have. Whilst we appreciate this may appear early it is so that we can get them out to you with the potential to buy sets of cards your child has designed.
 

 

Week Beginning 22nd September 2025

We have had a super week at nursery this week continuing to learn about bears. This week we have looked at different bears and thought about where they live; polar bears in the arctic, panda bears in the forest and brown bears in the woods. We have learnt the Makaton signs for 'bear,' 'who' and 'hear' this week. We have listened carefully to the story of Polar bear Polar bear what do you hear and thought about the sounds that each of the animals make. The children have been encouraged to communicate using words and ask one another if there is something they need on the table. During our structured play sessions we have been learning to compare groups of objects using the vocabulary of 'more' and 'less' as well as making a group have less by taking things away. We continue to develop our mark-making using lines to create animal legs, raindrops and tree trunks.

Week Beginning 15th September 2025

This week at nursery we have been a hive of activity and concentration. We have continued with our bear theme. Our focus book was 'Brown bear, Brown bear what do you see'. We shared the story throughout the week and had lots of activities based around the story including talking about different bears (panda bears, brown bears, teddy bears), completing bear puzzles, and creating hand print art work linked to the story characters.

In the creative area we have been learning to use different tools such as forks, paint brushes and our hands to create art work. We even had a try at making our own puzzles by cutting bear pictures and placing the pieces back together.

We are really focusing on lunchtime routines; washing our hands, finding our own lunchboxes and then sitting down to eat our food.