Our Ducklings (EYFS)  are taught by Mrs Curtis and Mrs Dixon, our deputy headteachers. Mrs Curtis teaches on a Monday, Tuesday and alternate Wednesday and Mrs Dixon teaches on alternate Wednesdays, Thursday and Fridays. Mrs Walker is the Ducklings teaching assistant in the mornings and Mrs Truman and Mrs Bevan support in the afternoons.

   

Mrs Curtis                      Mrs Dixon                         Mrs Walker             Mrs Truman     Mrs Bevan

If you need to contact your child’s class teacher, you can do this via Class DoJo or via the class email address  ducklingparents@streetlaneprimary.org 

Our youngest children enjoy a wide range of continuous provision activities to enable them to complete the majority of their learning through play. The children have daily access to both the indoor and  outdoor learning environments and are encouraged to engage in a combination of independent learning, adult led play activities and focused teaching activities.

Our Ducklings have a daily Phonics, Maths, Funky Fingers and story time session which are taught in addition to carefully planned play activities to encourage development across all seven areas of learning.

This year our unit headings have been chosen carefully based on what we will think will be of interest to the children, inspire our children to have a love of learning and nurture their curiosity about the world.

Summer Term One 2024

Please click here to view our medium term planning for this term.

Spring Term Two 2024

We hope everyone enjoyed the half-term break. This term we will be learning all about springtime and the new life it brings. We will be observing the development of our frog spawn and looking out for the springtime flowers blooming around our school. 

Please click here to view our medium term planning for this term.

Art Project

As part of our art project this term we are thinking about creating art from natural resources. We read the book ‘Wherever Artist’ by Nikki Slade Robinson during our park visit and learnt about how we can make art from anything. We then looked at the work of artist Andy Goldsworthy and collected lots of natural resources to start creating our own pictures in class next week.                                                              

World Book Day

We had a wonderful (and busy!) day on Thursday. We started off with a parade to show off all of our wonderful costumes and then had a go at designing our own book tokens for a national competition. After a special World Book Day lunch we then had a ‘book blether’ with children from other classes and discussed our favourite books as well as listening to the staff read their favourites. We ended the afternoon by choosing our favourite class book (the Ducklings chose ‘Aliens love Underpants’ 👽 🩲 and we decorated our own book cover and added photographs of ourselves inside. What a wonderful day! 

   

Our Farm Shop

We have opened a Ducklings Farm Shop, selling the fruits, vegetables and produce from the farms in the countryside. We wrote shopping lists and then asked the shopkeepers to help us find what we wanted. Some children wrote a list of what the farm shop sold and decided upon the prices. Some produce was quite expensive! We then did a stock take and ordered more produce from the farm. Happy days!

     

        

 

 

Spring Term One 2024

Happy New Year! We are very excited to be back at school ready for a new year of fun and learning. Our school theme for this term is 'Step Back in Time' and we will be focusing lots of our learning on transport and making things move. 

Please click here to view our medium term planning for this term.

Fantastic Phonics!

We are very proud of our Ducklings and the progress they are making with their reading and writing.  This term we have learned the consonant digraphs for sh, ch, th and ng. Our children are very confident at sounding out and blending workds containing these digraphs. Well done Ducklings!

      

Mini First Aiders

Our PSHE topic throughout school this term is Being Safe. We have earned about how we can stay safe at home, in school, whilst walking near roads and near water. We had a special visit from Maria from Mini First Aiders who came to train all of the children in basic first age. In the Ducklings class we learned how to put a plaster on a cut that is bleeding to help stop infection. We also learned about how to use a cold compress to help with bumps. The most improtant thing we learned was to know how to call 999 if there was an emergency and say where we were so the paramedics could come and help us. We pretended to be at home and said our home addresses too. We had lits of fun but leanred some very important lessons that one day may save a life!

       

Fun at the Park!

We had a great session in the park on Friday afternoon. 
We  took our tyres into the park and had a ‘wheely’ good race down the hills. The children were only allowed to use their hands (and gravity!) to get their wheels down to the bottom field. We then sang some songs and used our tyres to make a boat before risking our lives by ‘walking the plank’ in shark and crocodile infested waters (we had some very enthusiastic and hungry animals!! 🐊 🦈) 

Great team work Ducklings! 

      

    

Autumn Term Two 2023

We are looking forward to the new term and all the exciting preparations for Christmas! This term we will also have focus theme weeks for Anti-Bullying week and Road Safety Week. Our school theme continues to be 'Then and Now' but in the EYFS we will be following the theme of Celebrations. It's going to be a busy but exciting term!

Please click here to view our planning for Autumn Term Two.

The Twinkly Nativity

Well done to our fabulous cast of The Twinkly Nativity! The children were all amazing, said their words confidently and sang beautifully. We are very proud of you all! Happy Christmas!

           

                 

Meeting a Real Life Superhero!

We have been learning about the different jobs that people do in our community. We have thought about how these people help us and make our community a safe and friendly place to be. We had a visit from Firefighter Neil who talked to us about his job and all the amazing things he does to help people. He showed us how quickly he gets ready when there is an emergency call. He even let us try on his helmet and jacket! It was great to meet Neil!                                                                                                                                                                            

                                                         

                                      

Learning About Maps

We have been learning about different maps, how to make them, read them and also how to programme our Beebots to move around them. We began by listening to the story of Rosie's Walk and mapping out all the objects or buildings on the farm that she had walked around. We then drew a map of the classroom and used our programmable mice to move to the different areas. Finally, we used the Beebots and learnt to programme a route for them to follow. We learnt lots and had great fun!

                                     

Autumn Term One 2023

Our learning 

Our school theme for the Autumn term is 'Then and Now'. Our Duckling children are going to be learning lots of new routines and taking part in exciting activities linked to our unit heading of 'Growing Up'.

Please click here to view our planning for Autumn Term One.

Representation of Numbers

Our Ducklings have made great progress with their Mathematics work this term. We have explored numbers to 5 and have looked at lots of different ways to represent them. We are now working on numbers to 10!

          

Planting Bulbs

This week we have been busy tidying up our planting tubs. We grew carrots over the summer, so we harvested these and sold them in our shop. We then removed all the weeds and planted some daffodil and tulip bulbs. Hopefully they will sleep over the winter and then burst into life in the springtime!

     

       

Our new Ducklings have settled beautifully into school life. They are following our routines and are making lots of friends and learning new things every day. We are very proud of all of them!

         

         

Please click here to view our learning for the Summer Term.

Summer Term 2023

Focus Stories

This term we have read lots of books linked to our topic of castles. These have included 'In the Castle', 'The Story Book Knight', 'The Paper Bag Princess' and 'Zog'. We loved The Paper Bag Princess and thought about what we would be like if we were royal princes and princesses. The children drew themselves onto a paper bag and wrote a description of their royal self. Wonderful work everyone!

    

Fantastic Writing

We have made fairy wands this week and thought about the spells we would like to learn. We pretended to be naughty fairies and turned our friends into cats, frogs and dogs! It was good fun and we wrote our spells using all of the phase 3 vowel sounds that we have recently learnt.

            

Castles

This term we have been learning about castles. We have earned lots of new vocabulary to describe the different parts of a castle, made our own castles which we could then play with and built models of castles from around the world using our large construction equipment outside. We have really enjoyed this exciting learning!

    

Bye Tadpoles!

We have loved looking after our frogspawn and watch it change into lots and lots of tadpoles! we   have watched them and grow and begin to form little back legs! We were all a bit sad when it was     time to say goodbye and release them back into the safety of the river. We hope you come back   and visit us as little frogs!! 

              

Spring Term Two 2023

Click here to take a look at what Duckling class are learning in our Fire and Ice theme in Spring term 2.

Easter Fun!

We have had lots of fun completing Easter activities in the Ducklings class. We melted chocolate to make our own yummy bun nests and then used our careful cutting skills to make cardboard baskets to put them in. We used the skills we have learnt in DT to join pieces of cardboard to make a hide-a-way bunny to hide our uprise chocolate eggs in! 

                 

                                                                                                      

We decorated Easter Eggs using sponge painting and glass beads. We also followed maps to find Easter eggs in our outdoor play area. This was tricky but fun, and we had to follow the map carefully to find where they were hidden!

                           

There were some incredible Easter bonnets for our Easter parade and it was very tricky to choose a winner but well done Isabelle! The judges loved the ingenuity of your design and your careful, independent work! 

                                                                                        The Winning Bonnet! 

           

              

                                        World Book Day 2023!

Our challenge this year was for the children to find texts to read that were not out of a book to show how important it is to develop our reading skills for all types of every day functions. Look at the different reading materials the Ducklings found!

      

       

Gruffalo Stew! February 2023

For our cookery project this term we practised our peeling, chopping and stirring skills to make a delicious Gruffalo stew! We used lots of great ingredients including Gruffalo tongue (cubed beef), purple prickles (red onion), orange eyes (carrots), poisonous warts (peas), Gruffalo teeth (sweetcorn) and tusks (sliced potato). After we had prepared the ingredients we left them all day to cook in the slow cooker and then enjoyed eating our Gruffalo stew with some crusty bread - it was delicious! 

          

                           

Fun at the Park!

We have started going to visit the park on a Friday afternoon with Mrs Dixon, Mrs Trueman and Mrs West. We have been practising our gross motor skills and working on our physical development. It has been great fun to explore this new learning environment and we have enjoyed rolling down the muddy hills in our puddle suits and using our bodies to make mud and snow angels!

               

 We have practised using the hoops to throw, catch and move our bodies through. We played a fun game where we had to pass the hoop all the way around the circle without letting go of our friends hands - it was really tricky and we had to concentrate really hard!

  

       

This week we enjoyed using natural 'face paints' (mud!) We have been reading the story "Monkey Puzzle" by Julia Donaldson as part of our literacy work and thinking about different jungle animals. We used the mud to camouflage ourselves into terrifying tigers! 

       

 

The Rainbow Fish

Our focus book for week 2 this term was The Rainbow Fish.In understanding of the World we talked about the oceans of the world and the animals that live in them. In our Ready to Write sessions we labelled different animals with their initial sounds and for some animals like crab and fish the children could write all of the sounds. On our creative table the children used their Funky Fingers to cut our a tale for their fish from a paper plate, paint the plate and then folded small circles into semi-circles to create the scales. Our classroom is now full of beautiful rainbow fish!

          

          

Fun with Phonics

The children are all making great progress with their reading and writing, and we are so proud of them! This week we used the large foam letters to make CVC words. The children shouted our each sound and then together said the full word. Then when a fourth child wanted to play they added an s to make the words plural. Fantastic work ducklings!

Our learning 

Click here to take a look at what Duckling class are learning in our Fire and Ice topic in Spring term 1.

Spring Term One 2023 

Christmas Fun!

Christmas has arrived in the Ducklings Classroom. During Advent, we will be spending lots of time playing in our Santa's Grotto, creating stories with the small world Christmas characters and reading Christmas stories. We are going to be learning a new Christmas Makaton action every day and of course practising very hard for our Nativity play!

      

    

Odd Socks Day 2022

Odd Socks Day was great fun! We came to school wearing odd socks to show how we are all unique and to celebrate our differences. This was the beginning of our theme week for Anti-Bullying Week, and we shared assemblies, stories and completed lots of activities in class to think about ways in which we promote our school values of kindness and respect. At the end of the week we celebrated Friendship Friday and make an Elmer elephant from different coloured handprints for our display in the school office.

           

    

Please click here to view our plans for this term's learning.

Autumn Term Two 2022

                                                         Halloween!

We have had a wonderful day today. The children loved being able to show their grown-ups the classroom this morning and we have had fun with spooky activities all day! The pumpkins were all amazing and many of these are still on display in the playground. The children all looked fantastic in their outfits and we all enjoyed the disco! I’m sure we have many very tired children tonight! Thank you to all parents and carers for supporting us today!

  

  

Fruit Kebabs

We have enjoyed learning a song about the colours of the rainbow  this term and learning how to sign the colours using Makaton actions.
For our cookery project this term we thought about different coloured fruits and created a rainbow fruit kebab using strawberries (red), satsuma (orange), banana (yellow), kiwi (green), blueberries (blue), grapes (indigo), watermelon (violet).
We practised the skills of washing, peeling, chopping to prepare the fruits for our kebabs.

  

  

Popping Phonics!

All of our Ducklings are making super progress with their phonics. We had fun playing some games on our interactive board listening to the phoneme and choosing the correct grapheme to represent the phoneme! Well done!

  

The Colour Monster

During the first two weeks of school our focus books were ‘The Colour Monster’ and ‘The Colou Monster Goes to School.’ by Anna Llenas. We talked about how we were feeling and learned some Makaton actions to show that we were feeling happy, angry, excited or sad. We sang our song of the week ‘If You’re Happy and You know it’ and that made everyone feel happy. We also collaged some colour monsters to show how he was feeling in the story. Well done Ducklings!

 

 

Making New Friends

Our new Ducklings have settled beautifully into school. Everyone has enjoyed exploring our learning environment both indoors and outdoors and have made lots of new friends. We have spent lots of time singing, reading stories and have been busy talking to our new friends when we play games.

  

  

The classroom is ready and waiting. We hope you love school as much as we do!