Spring Term 1 2026

Week 1

Welcome back! We hope you had a wonderful Christmas with lots of gifts, food and fun! This week, our focus has been all about Mud and we have enjoyed listening to ‘Stuck in the mud’ a story about helping our friends. Our favourite song this week was ‘Wiggly Woo’ and we also loved ‘Wiggle like a worm’ both songs giving us the opportunity to wiggle and wriggle like a worm! We had great fun this week making our edible mud using some flour, cocoa powder, a drop of oil and mixing it all together.

In bucket time we enjoyed 3 muddy pigs where we filled pink balloons with brown paint, sang a song about pigs in the mud and then popped them creating a big muddy mess! We also had lots of fun on Thursday with our sensory story all about… yes you guessed it, mud.

In phonics learning, our focus word was… ‘Mud’! This was lots of fun as we were able to use the mud to mark make and write our word in. Alongside this, we identified magnetic letters on a tray, stamped our word in playdough and used a whiteboard to write our word.

In our maths learning, we focused on ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’. We watched ‘I can only draw worms’ - https://youtu.be/5Hay5BRsw_M and then we drew our own worms observing if they were bigger or smaller than the previous one.

In our music sessions this week, we loved wiggling like a worm where we worked on wiggling different parts of our bodies at different times to a fun song.

Our oracy focus this week was the word ‘Need’. We used lots of activities to show ‘need’ along with learning the sign. Our favourite activity was filling cups with water and once they were full signing and verbalising ‘I need’ and pointing to our object of reference – the cup.

Week 2 & 3

This fortnight has been all about the wonderful world of minibeasts. We have had a great time learning all about creepy crawlies, their legs, wings and bodies. We enjoyed listening to stories such as ‘Superworm’, ‘Minibeast Bop’ and ‘Butterfly bouquet’ and our favourite songs for this topic were ‘If I were a minibeast’ and of course the classic ‘Incy Wincy’ where we learnt the Makaton to sign along.

In bucket time, we loved Minibeast surprise where we placed some minibeasts into a container then shook it, tapped it and swirled it before putting our hand in and taking out a minibeast and naming it. We also loved our minibeast sensory story learning about the snail’s spiral shell, feeling the spider’s delicate web and listening to the caterpillar munching on the leaves.

In phonics, our word of the week was ‘bug’. We used our bugs to splat alongside our sounds to make up the word, wrote our word in the sand and stamped our word into playdough.

Our maths learning this week, our focus was ‘longer’ and ‘shorter’ where we used playdough to roll it out to create different length worms. We were able to compare our worms and use our ‘longer’ or ‘shorter’ vocabulary.

In music this week we moved our bodies to the ‘Millipede March’. We spun sneaky webs like spiders, hopped around like grasshoppers, opened and closed our wings like butterflies and marched like millipedes!

Our oracy focus in week 2 was ‘See’ and in week 3 was ‘up & down’ where we enjoyed lots of different activities such as ‘I see you’ where the children came up to the mystery box to have a look inside and discovered the surprise was themselves!! Our favourite ‘up & down’ activity was ‘parachute float’ where we lifted it and said ‘up’ and then dropped it and said ‘down’. This was a lot of fun 😊

Week 4 & 5

This fortnight, we have been learning all about flowers and we had great fun exploring from the roots to the petals and all things in between. We listened to stories such as ‘Sam plants a sunflower’ and particularly enjoyed ‘From seed to flower’. The songs were the best yet this week and if you want to have some fun with your children, grab a little scarf and pop this song on - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8bDwuz0NLY

In bucket time, we enjoyed the magic colour-changing flowers where we sprayed the paper flowers with coloured water and watched them bloom identifying the colours as they appeared. We also had great fun contributing to a large flower painting where we took it in turns to paint the petals – making a choice of the paint and then carefully painting within the lines.

In phonics, our focus words were ‘dirt’ and ‘seed’. We spent lots of time segmenting and blending our words and used lots of different activities to support our learning such as writing our words in dirt, using letter cubes to help us with the segmentation, matching our words to their objects and many more.

Our maths learning recently was all about counting to 5. We thoroughly enjoyed incorporating our theme into this and used the petals of a flower to help us. We used the stem of the flower and had to push our petals onto it whilst counting on up to 5.

In music, we have been learning a dance routine in Zumba style. We were focusing on using our arms and legs simultaneously whilst keeping time to the music. We also have been enjoying Yoga which has been stretching our bodies and giving us an opportunity to feel calm and quiet.

Our oracy focus this fortnight has been ‘In & Out’ and ‘On & Off’. We had great fun learning the Makaton for these words alongside engaging activities such as ‘pom pom pouring’ – where we poured the pom poms in and out of containers. We also loved getting the karaoke machine out to help us understand ‘on and off’ where we were able to sing and dance to music when it was playing and stop when it was not.

Week 6

How time flies when you are having such fun! In our final week of the term, we have been learning all about planting. Let’s just say this was a messy one with lots of dirt and handwashing 😊. Our focus story this week was Jack and the beanstalk and our song of the week was ‘The farmer plants his seeds’.

In bucket time this week we loved planting seeds together in a turn-taking fashion. We took turns in putting the soil into the pot, placing our chosen seed inside, covering it with more soil and finally giving it a big drink of water.

In phonics, our focus word was ‘grow’. We used lots of actions and Makaton sign to support our learning of this word alongside our usual offer of highlight write, identifying magnetic letters on the tray, writing in sand and using letter cubes to help with segmenting.

Our maths learning this week we enjoyed some measuring activities. First, we drew lots of lovely flowers on the paper making some of them tall and some of them small. We then used cubes to help us measure how tall the flowers were using our vocabulary from previous weeks ‘bigger, smaller, shorter, taller’.

In music this week, we had lots of fun with the Wiggles! We shook like a leafy tree, planted some seeds in our gardens, picked the flowers that grew and lots more all along to songs.

Our oracy focus this week was ‘What’. We spent lots of time asking ‘what’ in different fun activities. Our favourite activity had to be ‘what is it?’ where objects were hidden underneath cups. We were able to then choose the cup we wanted to lift and named the surprise object hidden beneath it.