Spring Term - Frozen Landscapes 

Happy New Year Reception! Welcome back to another exciting school term where we will be getting our thinking heads working again after such a long and well deserved holiday break. Thank you for all of your lovely presents, I hope our sneaky elf told Father Christmas how amazing you all are and that you had a fantastic Christmas!

Our New Topic: Frozen Landscapes!!!!!

For the first 3 weeks of Spring, children will be focusing on this new topic, exploring the polar regions, and learning about what types of animals we might find there.

Literacy - The Something by Rebecca Cobb

In Literacy we will be moving on from out Percy the Park Keeper stories and diving into a book written by the Author Rebecca Cobb, called 'The Something'. This book will really bring out Reception's imagination as we seek to find out what could be living in the deep dark hole. Whilst completing this focus book, children will also learn how to plan to write a losing story, using the focus book and model text to guide us.

Taken from the statements within the Development Matters, the list below are the Areas of Learning in which Reception children will be focusing on during this Topic:

Early Years Learning Objectives:

(Taken from Development Matters)

Knowledge and Understanding of the World: The World

40-60 months

• Looks closely at similarities, differences, patterns and change.

Early Learning Goal

• Children know about similarities and differences in relation to places, objects, materials and living things.
• They talk about the features of their own immediate environment and how environments might vary from one another.
• They make observations of animals and plants and explain why some things occur, and talk about changes.

 Expressive arts and design: Exploring and using media and materials (40-60+ months)

• Explores what happens when they mix colours.
• Understands that different media can be combined to create new effects. •Manipulates materials to achieve a planned effect.

Expressive Arts and Design: Being imaginative (40-60+months)

Create simple representations of events, people and objects.

• Chooses particular colours to use for a purpose.

Key Vocabulary/Glossary for 'Frozen Landscapes'

Antarctica- the southernmost continent and site of the South Pole

Arctic- The Arctic is a polar region located at the northernmost part of Earth.

Cold- a low temperature; cold weather; a cold environment.

Defrost- Defrosting is the melting of an object or bringing a device's temperature above the freezing point to remove frost or ice.

Freeze- to become hardened into ice or into a solid body; change from the liquid to the solid state by loss of heat.

Frozen- (of a liquid) having turned into ice as a result of extreme cold.

Ice- frozen water, a brittle transparent crystalline solid.

Melt- make or become liquefied by heat.

Snow- atmospheric water vapour frozen into ice crystals and falling in light white flakes or lying on the ground as a white layer.