• Playing and Exploring
• Active Learning
• Creative and Critical Thinking

These characteristics are encouraged, developed and supported to enable children to make progress in all areas of learning and development.

Listening, Attention & Understanding Speaking:
Weekly focused games to encourage interaction, listening and developing conversational skills (Following the Lift Off to Language initiative).
Encouraging questioning conversations and sparking verbal interaction through activities
Looking at how minibeasts are equipped to live in the environment, how do they differ?
Changes in seasons and weather.
Looking at all different reading material, fiction and non-fiction.
Encouraging bursts of focused listening by watching topic-based clips, playing games and using the Internet to fact find.

Creating with Materials:
Be able to use equipment and tools to change and create with a purpose, starting to choose the types of media they want to create with and deciding tools to assist in the outcomes.

Being Imaginative & Expressive:
Introduce story and imagination into play, for example through role-play and small world.
Learn and sing familiar songs and rhymes, responding to music with dance, actions and instruments.
Looking at a variety of new instruments and songs that they may not have had access to, considering tempo, volume and beat.

Comprehension:
Be encouraged to make suggestions for what could happen next when hearing new stories.
Looking at the structure of story books.

Reading Stories:
The Hungry Caterpillar, The Quiet Cricket, non-fiction books.
Develop an awareness of the purpose of words and descriptive language.
Focus on rhyme using songs and games, such as Slug in a Jug and Rhyming Lotto.

Writing:
Recognise and make marks with meaning; use a variety of mark-making tools and gain confidence and strength.

Number:
Continue developing our knowledge of shapes and patterns in the natural environment.
Looking for evidence of numbers around us and the concept of counting items that can't be moved or are not present.

Number Pattern:
Use toys and resources, such as tessellating shapes and repeating patterns, including number patterns.
Explore how numbers and shapes can be used and adapted for a purpose.

Self-regulation:
Understand different feelings and emotions, including discussions about facial expressions and how to show different feelings.

Managing Self:
Be confident to try new activities and make choices for themselves, with a focus on turn-taking, sharing and kindness.
Learn how to be responsible in the setting, tidy up activities used.
Consider clothing for weather conditions, making their own choices.

Building Relationships:
Become familiar with adults and children in the setting, learning names and becoming familiar with routines.
Be happy to join in with a range of group activities.
How to integrate new peers into the established setting.

Gross Motor:
Focusing on using the large equipment; Trim Trail, climbing frame, scooters and bikes.
Encouraging children to consider their safety and give some thought to risks, e.g. safe climbing, height, bike helmets, weather conditions.

Topic Based:
Moving like bugs and minibeasts.

Fine Motor:
Using tweezers to hunt and collect bugs in the garden, practising holding and using mark-making tools to mark make confidently with purpose.

Past & Present:
Looking at the seasons and weather changes in the space of a year and what we expect from the seasons.

People, Culture & Communities:
Look at events that are happening such as Father's Day, May Day, summer holidays.
Look at how the weather and seasons affect jobs and businesses.

The Natural World:
Looking at the environment and how different minibeasts live in and around us; how they have adapted to their environment.
How they help our ecosystem and the effect humans are having on the natural world, including how we can help.