Home » EYFS – Newsletter – 28/11/2025

EYFS – Newsletter – 28/11/2025

It’s been a mixed-bag of weather this week, which saw us playing with ice and frost early in the week before basking in double digits for Forest Schools on Thursday. Always lots of fun though!

Our Toytown topic has continued and we have focused on how toys move. The children loved investigating clockwork toys and learning about how they harness from coiled springs energy to create momentum. After seeing how they work, the children had a great amount of fun with some clockwork toy racing as they turned the keys on a host of Christmassy characters to see how far they would travel. We also gave all the children opportunity to create their own wind-powered toy car from a milk carton with milk bottle wheels, which was powered by the air pushing out from a balloon taped to the roof. From looking at a series of marble runs on the smartboard, we also harnessed good old gravity to enjoy the challenge of making our own marble runs, both inside with a special building set, and outdoors using all manner of our provision resources. These marble runs needed a lot of patience and really tested the children’s problem solving skills as they made adjustments to help the marble run through the course successfully.

Last week, Miss Bostock taught us all about traditional toys and how they were often made from different materials than modern toys. Following on from that, the children were invited to make their own peg dolls using a clothes peg and scraps of material.

Our Phonics sessions this week have introduced the children to two new sounds, ‘f’ (fairy) and ‘l’ (lollipop). By blending the learned sounds together the children have practised reading words and phrases and then demonstrating their understanding by matching them to a corresponding picture. We have also had a try at listening carefully to words and determining what the initial sound is, which is a great way to begin segmenting words to spell them accurately. The children have also been getting more familiar with the ‘tricky’ words I, no, go, to and the. These words are not phonically decodable with the sounds we learn in Reception but occur frequently in books, so we teach these to be recognised by sight to help improve reading fluency.

Maths sessions have seen us exploring the terms ‘more’ or ‘less’ and how we can use these to refer to numbers and to groups of people or objects. The children investigated this concept practically to find one more or one less than a given number.

We are all really looking forward to the Cookridge Christmas Fair next week and thought we’d give you all a sneak peak of our Christmas crafts that we shall be selling on Reception’s stall. We do hope lots of you are able to drop by and support the Christmas fair after school on Tuesday as all the money raised really helps the school afford to help the children do so many fun and interesting things – and it’s a lot of fun!