Beech Grove Primary School
Spring Term 2025
Head Teacher’s Message
Happy New Year everyone and welcome to spring term 2025. The time has flown since children started their new classes in September! This Spring term will fly even faster no doubt as the evenings become lighter and the daffodils start to poke through putting a smile on everyone’s face.
As Head teacher of your school, I continue to be so proud of all of the children and the way they have started back since returning from the Christmas break. Their resilience and adaptability remain outstanding.
This was picked up on and noticed in abundance during the schools Ofsted Inspection on the 22nd and 23rd of October. The HMI Ofsted Inspector was blown away of what he described to us as ‘school is an oasis of calm’ for all children at Beech Grove.
“Pupils at Beech Grove are proud of their school, welcoming visitors with exemplary manners and conduct. They understand the school’s ‘next-door neighbour’ principles and the school’s five golden rules well. Pupils consistently show high levels of respect to adults and to one another. They are happy and safe. Highly trained staff put pupils’ needs first in all they do. Pupils thrive in the warm and nurturing environment that the school fosters.” Ofsted 2024/25. What a fantastic first paragraph of the Ofsted Report to read. I’m sure you’ll all agree.
This term we hope to pick up where we left off before Christmas with our children achieving good progress within their core subject areas, due to the tremendous hard-working attitude of themselves and the dedicated staff team here at school.
“Leaders have created a culture of high expectations for pupils’ achievement. Pupils meet these expectations… Behaviour across school is of a high standard. Well-trained staff create a purposeful learning atmosphere. Pupils’ learning is not disrupted by others. ”Ofsted 2024/25.
Children’s classroom and corridor manners remain amazing which continues to maintain a lovely, positive and caring atmosphere around school. The schools “Next Door Neighbour Qualities” of Respect, Tolerance and Kindness are certainly being upheld. The children take great pride in this in and around school and it is wonderful to see. Please keep having a bit of fun at home and test the children regularly on what it takes in school (and the community) to be a good “Next Door Neighbour”!
This term we will also be hoping for some lovely spring sunshine so that children can make full use of our Secret Garden in lesson time and maybe plant some wonderful spring flowers for us all to enjoy (even the ducks!!!). I always think that spring flowers with their vibrant colours and freshness cheer everyone up from the gloom of the long, dark and wet winter months. They are a sign that lighter nights and warmer weather is on its way! (fingers crossed)
Our teachers have lots of interesting activities planned for this term and hope that you will enjoy hearing what children have been working on at consultation meetings/phone conversations, and will support them with their homework and reading outside of school.
Please, please, please x10000 keep encouraging your child to read at home. Reading is the key to everything! The children are showing such a passion and love of reading in school, we hope you will continue this with them at home.
We also hope that every effort is made by you for every child to attend school regularly. It is so important for your child’s development. We can’t continue to stress this enough. (95% and above is GOOD attendance). As a school we need to bet better on the first and last day of terms. Far too many children have these particular days off.
In addition to this being ON TIME every day for school is absolutely vital so that your child does not miss any of their learning. It can be really upsetting and frustrating for children if they come into a lesson that is part way through and they’ve missed vital teacher input and modelling. It can cause them great distress and being left with a feeling of not understanding what is expected of them.
Its really pleasing to see that our ‘lates’ are reducing and that you are all working really hard to support school on this issue. Well done everyone. Keep up the great efforts. Let’s have all the children in on time every day!
Here’s to a really positive Spring term!
John Dixon
Our work for this term
(The EYFS Curriculum is made up of 7 areas of development)
1. English
Our main focus in Nursery is developing good Speaking and Listening Skills and fostering Early Reading and Writing Skills.
SPEAKING AND LISTENING – The children will engage in a wide range of play-based activities – supported by adults to encourage conversation skills and extend the children’s vocabulary. We will develop good listening skills during carpet time with a range of stories, rhymes, songs and listening games. We will be having a role play hospital area (Spring 1) and then a hen house/farm (Spring 2) to encourage new vocabulary and to link to our new topics.
READING – The very first step for learning to read is to develop a love of books. So we will share super stories every day. We share a story during whole class carpet time. We also read books in small groups and to individual children in the story corner throughout the day. We often read the same books over and over so that the children become familiar with them. The children will start having favourite stories and ask for them. They may begin to recite the stories by themselves. We will also encourage the children to look at books by themselves so that they become familiar with handling books – holding them the right way up and turning the pages one at a time going left to right – these are all early reading skills that the children need to learn. We will also begin to do some story telling of our own using props and puppets.
WRITING – Early writing begins with MARK MAKING. The children will eventually learn how to hold a pencil properly and to make a variety of pre-writing marks – lines, circles and crosses. Before this happens, the children need to build up strength in their hand and finger muscles. We will be doing lots of fine motor exercises- dough disco, squeezing stress balls, pinching pegs, threading. We will also be doing lots of gross motor exercises to build our core strength to prepare us to write- stretch bands, space hoppers, trampolines etc. We will be making marks in a variety of materials- glitter, shaving foam, paint. We will be practising our scissor skills to cut and our co-ordination to do buttons and zips.
2. Maths
This term we will be focussing on rote counting past 5 and 1:1 counting (saying one number for each item) We will be singing number rhymes such as “Five little ducks” “Five little speckled frogs” etc. We will be practising using our “finger numbers” to show numbers up to 5 and we will be beginning to record our Maths using symbols and marks. We will be exploring Maths in continuous provision in our areas e.g. using size vocabulary in our construction area, talking about full/empty and capacity vocabulary in our water area, counting milk and fruit at snack time, etc.
3. Topic
Our topic for Spring 1 is ‘Why do you love me so much?’ – We will be reading the story “Guess how much I love you” and talking about the people we love. We will be looking at photos of our families and adding them to our home corner to promote speaking. We will be learning about people who look after us when we need help (doctors, nurses, paramedics). We will be celebrating pancake day and Chinese New Year.
For Spring 2 our topic is “Are eggs alive?” In March we are going to be having some special guests in Nursery. We will be receiving some live eggs and the children will be able to watch them hatch into ducklings. We will be learning about the life cycle of a duck and we will be doing lots of Easter activities. We will learn about other animals that are born in Springtime and other animals that hatch from eggs.
4. Safeguarding (What we are teaching children to help them keep safe)
The children will be learning about rules and routines in the classroom and the playground. We will focus on our FIVE GOLDEN RULES and ensure children understand what each rule means. We will talk about why we have rules to keep everybody safe and happy. We will also show children the correct way to use our climbing equipment in the outdoor area. We will learn about the importance of washing our hands to keep germs away and talk about different ways to stay healthy and safe.
Dates for your Diary
Spring Term: Monday 6th January 2025 – Friday 11th April 2025
Half Term: Monday 24th February 2025 – Friday 28th February 2025
