Autumn Term 1 2025

Week 1 & 2

Welcome back to Atlas! We have had a great fortnight settling into our routines and getting to know each other which has tied in very nicely with our first topic 'Me & You'.
We have been exploring ourselves through songs such as 'I am special 🎶' and 'me! 🎶 '. We have listened to stories which have given us opportunities to understand what is special about ourselves and has given us lots of positive reinforcement. Our favourite was 'What I like about me'. In our activities, we have enjoyed looking at ourselves in mirrors and singing ‘head, shoulders, knees and toes’ to support identifying our own features. What shocked us the most was when Nia decided to cut our photos up and then we had to work really hard to stick them back together, this was fun but quite tricky!

In bucket this fortnight, we loved 'me splat' where we found our own pictures and had a turn at splatting ourselves. We also enjoyed happy and sad pop where we had a little jump when Nia popped the happy 😊 balloons and then the sad ones 😢. We enjoyed ‘flour shake’ in stage 3 too where we shook lots of flour all over our own pictures and then used a brush to reveal the special pictures of us. In another stage 2 activity, we really enjoyed practicing our blowing skills through a straw to blow the paint to create crazy hair pictures.

In phonics this fortnight, we recapped our initial phonic sound 'm' - maisy mountain mountain and learnt the word 'me' where we finger traced it, made our word with magnetic letters and stamped our letters into playdough. We then moved onto our next word ‘mat’ where we played ‘splat the mat’ sounding out each sound as we went. We have been blending our sounds, writing the words in the sand, finding the magnetic letters to match the large phonic cards and stamping them in playdough.

Our core words on Wednesday were 'me' and ‘you’ where we learnt the signs. We were very good at doing this and continued signing this throughout the weeks. Our stage 2 activities to go with our core words were ‘face splat’ where we had to find ourselves and then use a swatter to splat ourselves. We also had ‘You are my sunshine’ where Elise chose our pictures and we all sang and listened to the song all about us!

We have had lots of time settling in this fortnight and have loved playing with small world toys, running, jumping and climbing in the outdoor area and most importantly getting to know our new friends and reconnecting with our old friends too.

A great fortnight in Atlas which we look forward to developing over the Autumn term!

Week 3 & 4

This fortnight has seen lots of fun activities where we have developed our understanding of our own worlds where our focus has been on family and friends. We have enjoyed stories such as 'Every family is different' and 'Be a friend' where themes of kindness and love have been at the core. We have been enjoying activities such as baby washing – bathing the babies, wrapping them in towels and feeding them with a baby bottle. We have spent lots of time in the small world area playing with the dolls house and identifying characters as our own family members and then using our imagination to play out sequences e.g. mummy in the bath!

In our bucket sessions we have enjoyed learning about being a good friend where we shared our resources with our friends once we had a turn. We were really good at this and had a lovely time taking our turn and then following the instruction to pass it over. We also enjoyed choosing coloured pencils to colour our own friendship bracelet on a sheet. We had to choose the colour we would like to choose by pressing our communication board and then had an opportunity to mark make our own designs.

In our phonics learning, we loved our words ‘cat’ and ‘sad’. Our special little kitten visited us in our bucket and helped us with our phonics learning where she used her paws to point to each sound. She then helped us to push our magnetic sounds into playdough, write our words in sand and wrote our words on whiteboards. With our next word ‘sad’, we had lots of fun learning our Makaton sign to express our sad feeling ☹. We used whiteboard markers to draw around a sad face and spent lots of time segmenting and blending our sounds

In our core word learning, our key words were ‘help’ and ‘want’. In our ‘want’ bucket, we drew on our prior learning and were able to identify the word ‘I’ and helped Miss Hakes to create special friendship bracelets. We used a communication board to help us choose coloured beads and then got to thread them on our string. In our ‘help’ bucket, we had to give lots of support to our adults through helping to open a really stuck on jar lid and then emptying the contents, rescuing Mr Potato Head’s body parts from the foam using tweezers and unzipping a zip wallet to rescue our ‘help’ symbol!

Week 5, 6 & 7