Beeford Church Of England Voluntary Controlled Primary School

Foundation Stage Unit 

'Fsu'

Hello from the fabulous FSU! In this class we learn how to be excellent 'Bucket Fillers' - If we do something kind or help others, they feel good, but it also makes us feel good too! We love to learn through exciting lessons and activities and take part in Drawing Club, Helicopter Stories, Games Afternoon, Forest Schools, and PE Sessions weekly as well as daily phonics and mathematics lessons. During 'Busy Bee' time we learn by exploring resources, choosing to take part in inviting experiences and using provocations to stimulate our play and creations both inside the classroom and in our lovely outdoor area. 

We also love visiting the library bus every other week!

Important Information

Phonics Page

Autumn Termly Overview

FSU Vision

Paediatric First Aid Trained Staff

To view the long term plan for the foundation stage please head over to the curriculum page, or to find out more about our curriculum please contact either the Class Teacher or Head Teacher via the school office

What we have been up to...

Bonjour! This month started with the whole school French breakfast, we also created some amazing models to represent some landmarks from France in our class.

In October we have been developing our communication and language through retelling our ‘The Write Stuff’ text Goldilocks and the Three Bears even using vocabulary such as 'delicious' and 'revolting' during our porridge tasting session! We have also been practicing holding our pencils and developing pencil control during pen disco sessions.

We have carried on learning about how to stay healthy and have been developing our memory through lots of games. We also played Kim's game with real fruits, learning the names of the fruit to describe what was missing. We then chose a piece of fruit to draw and looked very carefully at the colours and shapes to represent these. We predicted what the fruit might look like inside and were really surprised to discover what was actually inside some of them especially the pomegranate and passion fruit… some of them tasted delicious too!

As the weather has changed we have been spotting the signs of Autumn. We read The Leaf Thief and went on a leaf hunt to discover different types of leaves, using our identification chart to match the leaf. We used our finds to create a wax rubbing and were amazed when we saw the leaf appear! We have also explored autumn objects on an Autumn walk and during Busy bee time we have created hedgehogs from play dough, explored leaves on the light panel, and created cosy dens for the animals to hibernate in the small world area.

We ended the half term with our Diwali Celebrations. We listened to the story of Rama and Sita and discovered why Rangoli patterns and Diya lamps are important in the celebrations. In 'Busy -Bee time' we could create our own Rangoli style designs with the shape Duplo in the role play area and with chalks outside. Diwali means ‘rows of lighted lamps’. We also had Diya lamps in the role play area and made our own from cd's. We helped to make Vegetarian Curry for our Diwali feast, some of us even chose to have Mehndi patterns on our hands – these are usually drawn with henna.

Side Oven Bakery Visit

We had an amazing day at Side Oven Bakery. First we met the horses and were very calm and gentle when stroking them. Then we learned how flour was milled a long time ago and used some flour to make our own bread which we got to take home - yum!
In the orchard we picked different types of apple from the trees. Some of the apples had fallen from the trees already these were called 'windfall' and we predicted what animals might have been nibbling on them. We carried the apples back to the barn and helped to put them in the trug ready to make apple juice (some of us saved an apple for lunch). We had to work hard together to break the apples up and then squash them in the press to make the juice. The squashed apple left over is called apple cheese and is never wasted, it can be fed to pigs or chickens or put on the compost heap.
During the farm walk we learnt about sheep and what might live in a hedgerow, we also picked some pinecones, leaves and sticks for the minibeast house and even got to sit in a tractor!!

Wow what a busy first month of the year! The dentists in our classroom has been full of patients. They have arrived at the right time, waited to be called in to see the dentist, had their teeth checked and received advice on good dental hygiene. Our muscles are stronger too as we have been practising brushing the giant teeth. Then we explained to Prunella and Griselda how to keep their teeth healthy after reading Give us a smile Cinderella.
In Games afternoon we have played ‘The Spoon Game', we developed our hand eye co-ordination and blending skills when working out which object we had to pick up with the giant spoons then move it into the basket. We had to persevere as it was hard work! We took part in a Jigsaw Challenge - In pairs we had a go at making a large jigsaw together. It was important that we worked together and talked to each other to finish. We observed carefully and made links to work out where all the pieces needed to go by noticing matching edges, shapes, colours and patterns. We were also using our turn taking skills, making links and developing our communication and language by asking and answering questions to work out what the picture on our head was playing the What am I? describing game!
We have explored representing faces using different media, we painted our portraits, used natural objects we found to create clay faces and created our own fruit and vegetable faces after learning about the artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo. We had the opportunity to explore and refine these skills in Busy Bee time creating transient emoji faces on the lightbox and with the herbs and playdough. We used our senses in outdoor learning to pick the herbs, explore musical nature and developed our proprioception rolling down the hill. It has been great to see the variety of super child-led learning in Busy Bee time, we have even practiced performing for our Harvest Festival by exploring the electronic microphones, recording our singing and then listening back.

2023-2024

July

June

May

April

March

February

January 

December

November

October

September

Ice Experiment

Bridges for The Three Billy Goats Gruff

Opticians

Playdough Aliens

FSU Christmas Party

Happy Diwali

Side Oven Bakery

Outdoor Learning- Tree Faces

Outdoor Learning- Natural Material Treasure Hunt 

September Golf 

Sam's Safari

Burton Agnes Hall

Wow! What a brilliant day the FS2 children had on their trip to Burton Agnes Hall.

Sunflower Drawings, Sunflower  Seed Shakers and Planting Sunflower Seeds

Our ‘The Write Stuff’ text for this half term is Katie and the Sunflowers. Her trip to the art gallery helped us to discover about artists and some of us have chosen to paint some amazing sunflowers like Van Gogh on the painting easel. During our outdoor learning afternoon, we planted our very own sunflower seeds and used our great observation skills to look at the colours and textures of some beautiful enormous sunflowers to carefully create our own observational drawings. We have even used sunflowers seeds to create the noise in our shakers ready to use in our music lessons! Outside we have also been using language in role as we buy and sell flowers and other items in our new ‘Garden Centre’ role play area.  

Easter Celebrations

We were so busy before the holidays with our Easter Celebrations. Through listening to The Easter Story book, creating our own Easter gardens and by joining in with the whole school Easter Experience Reflection Day we learnt about why we celebrate Easter every year. We performed our song beautifully at Church and also joined in lots of exciting house activities such as egg hunting and egg rolling. In class we carefully decorated, cut out and made our own Easter Baskets.  To fill our super baskets, we made some yummy Chocolate Nest Buns we had to do some great listening to make sure we were measuring the ingredients carefully. 

Mr Wolf's Pancakes

We read the book Mr Wolf's Pancakes and had a go at making pancakes too, carefully measuring out our ingredients - they were yummy!
We also played What's the Time Mr Wolf? Then we discovered a police crime scene - we had to look for clues to see what had happened and discovered Mr Wolf had eaten all his neigbours!! Although his neighbours were not very kind to him we thought he should have helped them to make their own pancakes not eaten them up!!!
We also went outside and played pancake flipping with a tennis racket and a bean bag.

Police Visit 

We have had such a fantastic morning in the FSU!!  Two police officers came to visit our school to help us with our topic 'Who should I ask?'. We found out about the different hats and helmets the police can wear for different tasks or to show their different roles within the police force. We even got to try on the different hats and helmets - some are much heavier than others! We asked lots of questions - learning how their special belt and high visibility jacket helps to carry everything they need if they are on foot and easy to reach. To call each other on the radio they dial their police number - We all laughed when we listened to the grownups talk to each other on the police radio. We learned about some of the things that are kept in the back of the police car such as a sign to close the road and the stinger in case a car won't stop! We even had a go sitting in the car and could sit in the driver's side or the passenger side we found out that you have to keep in touch with the base to let them know where you are!

Powder Paint Mixing

This week the children have been learning the story of 'The Gingerbread Man'. The children mixed different colours of powder paint in order to explore the new colours they made. We had lots of fun doing this and had even more fun at the end of the day were we took part in a gingerbread fashion show!! We really enjoyed discussing what we liked about each others pictures.

Chinese / Lunar New Year

We have been very busy celebrating Chinese / Lunar New Year. We have taken part in Chinese dancing using paper fans, helped Mrs Baldwin to chop vegetables for our Chinese feast. We also made Chinese dragon masks. We also took part in an obstacle course whilst we pretended to be the different zodiac animals whilst crossing the river.

Yoga 

We took part in a group session of yoga. We listened to calming music which helped us to concentrate. We stretched our bodies and had to practise our breathing techniques.
When Miss Dean saw how relaxing it looked she even joined in too!!

Escaping the Magic Porridge

After we had listened to the story The Magic Porridge Pot we went outside to discover that there was porridge all over the floor (chalk!)
We acted out the characters feelings in the story and chanted the words such as 'stop little pot stop'
We then had to work together in groups to create an obstacle course so that we didn't have to walk through the ‘porridge’

Party Games 

We had so much fun playing some Christmas party games with our teachers. We played 3 different games which were; Bauble bowling, Pin the nose on the Snowman and Jingle bell throw. 

Reindeer Food

The children made a bag of reindeer food to sprinkle down for the reindeer's the night before Christmas. They had to follow the instructions which were:

1) First add a scoop of oats

2) After that add a dash of love

3) Then add a sprinkle of magic

4) Finally close your eyes and make a wish

Sideoven Bakery

Our Diwali Feast

This week we have been learning about the festival of Diwali. We have been super busy helping the grown ups prepare our Indian feast. We cut up mushrooms, baby sweetcorn and carrots ready for the curry making sure we used the bridge hold to keep our fingers safe. We really enjoyed trying the curry when it was cooked with pilau rice, naan bread, poppadoms, raita and mango chutney. Yum Yum!

Room on the Broom activities 

We developed our turn-taking, control, co-ordination, mathematical and physical skills playing games to see who could catch the most spiders using the tweezers before the 5 minute timer runs out and Room on the Broom Hoopla! We have also explored different sized pumpkins.

Busy Bee Time

Take a look at some of the pictures during our 'Busy Bee Time'.

Conker Rolling and Playdough Hedgehogs

We had so much fun rolling conkers down the drainpipes! Take a look at our cinnamon scented playdough hedgehogs.

FS1 Maths- Finding Circles and creating Shape Monsters

The FS1 children have been learning about circles. We went on a circle shape hunt in our outdoor area and we also made circle monsters using other shapes too.

Outdoor Learning- Conkers and Autumn Leaves

This week we went on a hunt for conkers and Autumn leaves. We hunted to find different coloured leaves and we then used these to create some leaf rubbings. We also played leaf whispers, whispering autumn words for our friends to listen carefully too around the circle. We used some of the extra leaves we collected for our leaf dance and enjoyed performing this to each other.

Role Play- Being dentists and dental nurses 

This week we have started becoming dentists and dental nurses in our role play area. We will be learning about the importance of brushing teeth and how to brush our teeth correctly with the use of our dental box that we have borrowed from a local dental practice.

Outdoor Learning

We learned about the land artist Andy Goldsworthy who became interested in natural transient art when he grew up farming in Yorkshire.
We then collected our resources and created our own natural sculptures with
- Leaves
- Stones
- Conkers and other natural materials

Golf

This term we have been learning Golf with Ivan. Listening really carefully to where we need to put our feet and our hands when we are taking a swing at the ball has helped us to become much more accurate with our shots.

Outdoor Learning

The children have really enjoyed our past 2 outdoor learning sessions.
We have: Rolled down the hill (which helps us to develop our proprioceptive sense) we talked about what we can do to help us keep the “Rule of Three”
1. Look after yourself 2. Look after one another 3. Look after our forest and planet.
We also went on a scavenger hunt and found lots of the things on our list such as cobwebs and ferns and a few things that weren't such as Bees and woodlice! We also created our own 'musical nature' drumming to accompany our singing!

We have collected lots of natural objects first such as leaves, feathers and stones. We then used the natural objects to play Kim's game which is great for our memory - even counting how many of each object there was so that we knew when only 1 conker had been taken away because there were 3 left!

We searched the field for the Tree Faces to match the ones our sheet. The tree faces each had a name such as Sid so we wrote their names next to their picture carefully copying the letters.

We used the natural objects that we had found and some clay to create our own faces. The clay was quite hard so our hand muscles were exercised and strengthened as we squashed and squeezed the clay ready. We thought carefully about what shape our features are to carefully choose which natural object should represent them.

RSPB Schools Birdwatch

We love learning about and caring for all of God's creatures and so we were very excited to try out our new binoculars for some bird spotting. We marked on our charts the birds that we had seen and then used lard, bird seed and pine cones to make feeders to hang in the trees. 

Muffin Pizza Faces

We really enjoy cooking and baking in the FSU so we had a great time making our individual pizzas. We learned how to safely use a knife by making a "bridge" to hold the vegetables, as well as expressing our freedom of choice by deciding what toppings to add to make our pizzas look like faces. The spinach was especially popular!

Once they were cooked, we all sat together to enjoy our tasty creations.

Forest School - Autumn Crowns

During our Forest School session, we enjoyed reading "We're Going on a Leaf Hunt" whilst hunting around our school grounds for beautiful leaves and other Autumn treasures. We even had a trip to the big Horse Chestnut tree in the car park and all found our very own shiny conker. 

Whilst hunting, we looked closely at the colours and shapes of the different leaves and enjoyed talking about our favourites. 

We then used our art and design skills to make our very own Autumn Crowns - we think we looked very smart!

Looking after our teeth

We were very lucky to have a visit from a dental nurse this week. She told us lots of ways to look after our teeth and we were very clever at helping her sort out the "treat foods" from the "healthy foods". 

She was able to leave some equipment with us so that we could pretend to be dentists - we really enjoyed brushing the enormous teeth with the huge yellow toothbrush!

 Autumn and Harvest time

For the past couple of weeks we have been talking about harvest and what this time of year means for farmers. We have spoken about how it is important for us to remember how lucky we are to have food on our plates at meal times, as some people aren't so lucky.

We have had our very own pumpkin patch outside which we have loved role-playing in, counting our pennies to see which pumpkins we can afford as well as using our maths skills (and our muscles!) to weigh and compare the pumpkins.

We have also been investigating some pumpkins in the tuff tray, as you can imagine we have loved getting messy, using different tools to pull out all of the seeds. 

Forest School - The Colour Monster

We have been reading the story of "The Colour Monster" so at the beginning of our Forest School session we practised moving in different ways according to how the different coloured monsters were feeling. 

After that, we used our collecting bags to find lots of different coloured natural items which we sorted into jars, just like the ones in the book!

We then bashed our petals and leaves onto fabric using a mallet to make our beautiful bunting to hang under our canopy.

 Vegetable Soup

Following our dental nurse visit, we have been spending time thinking about and discussing the things that keep us healthy and the difference between healthy foods and treat foods. 

We really enjoyed making our very own vegetable soup, practising our safe knife skills as well as using our senses to explore the ingredients - the onions were especially smelly!

We were also very proud and excited to be able to include the beans that we planted, nurtured and harvested ourselves.

Once the soup was cooked and we had buttered our bread, we were shown to our table in the "FSU Restaurant" by our waitress, Mrs Baldwin!

Forest School - Sit Spot

We spent some time deciding on our favourite place in the Forest School Area ("The Windy Willows") and then chose this as our "sit spot". We sat still and quiet for two minutes before telling our friends what we had seen and heard. 

We agreed that it would be interesting to come back to the same place again another day and see if anything had changed.

Before our customary "hill rolling" session, we laid down on our backs and watched the clouds, pointing out to our friends what shapes we could see - we even saw a dragon breathing fire!

Forest School - Minibeasts

In our first Forest School session of the year, we reminded ourselves how to keep safe. We recapped some of our rules such as how to carry a stick and that we always walk around the outside of the fire circle.

Next, we had a minibeast hunt. We are fascinated by minibeasts and learning to care for the smallest of God's creatures. It is interesting to think about where they live and why they look different to each other. 

At the end, we made our very own minibeast models out of clay and natural materials. 

Being Busy Bees

We are always busy bees!

We enjoy spending time roleplaying in the roleplay area, playing together with the 'small world' toys and making obstacle courses outside to climb and jump from.

Lots of us have found it fun experimenting with different ways of moving, walking on stilts  and practising using hula hoops. 

We have also produced some fantastic paintings and drawings, and we have been practising writing our names in our super neat handwriting.