Beech Grove Primary School
Autumn Term 2026
Head Teacher’s Message
Welcome back to our new Autumn term. On behalf of the staff, we would like to welcome you to a new school year and hope that 2026/2027 is just as brilliant as last year. It was wonderful to see our whole school community trying their very best for our children to try and reach their maximum potential. I am positive this year will be exactly the same.
Once again, I cannot thankyou enough for the tremendous efforts you went to during last year to support your children and the school. We should, as a school community be really proud of the way we continue to stick together and support one another.
I hope that you have all had the chance to relax and recharge your batteries during the summer holidays (wasn’t the weather just fabulous!) and are ready once more to attack the new school year with vigour and enthusiasm.
It is so important that our children attend regularly in order to continue to make the brilliant progress that they made last academic year. Our school attendance needs to be better! It is not acceptable to keep your child off for anything other than genuine illness and bereavement. Our school attendance will only get better with YOUR fantastic support.
I’m positive with your continued efforts, our excellent teaching and well-planned curriculum and interventions, our children will continue to achieve well and try their very best in all lessons.
After all my years at Beech Grove. I continue to be amazed by our children. I am so proud of them all and the way they have started back this Autumn term. The children’s continued resilience and adaptability is outstanding.
Our Next-Door Neighbour Qualities of Respect, Tolerance and Kindness shine through in their everyday school life. It is wonderful to see.
As always, 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, and will support them with their homework and reading outside of school. READING is the key to EVERYTHING and unlocking the children’s true potential! Please, please, please x10000000 encourage them as much as you can with their reading at home. It really is greatly appreciated by all staff.
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 sing nursery rhymes every day before home time.
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 visit our school library once a week to share books together.
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, crosses and zig zags . Before this happens, the children need to build up strength in their hand and finger muscles. Our continuous provision includes lots of activities designed to develop fine motor skills. For example, digging in sand, pouring water from jugs, putting pegs in peg boards, threading beads, scribbling with a variety of writing materials (chalks, crayons, felt pens, paint brushes), peeling satsumas and bananas, etc. As children become ready, we will help them to start writing their first initial and then their name. This will be their first introduction to writing letter shapes.
2. Maths
In the Nursery we practise counting skills as part of our everyday routines. We count how many children have turned 4 every time we have a birthday on our birthday wall. We count how many aprons are in the water area, so we know that 4 children can play there. We have daily Maths group times in small groups, This term we will be focussing on rote counting to five 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.
3. Topic
Our topic for Autumn 1 is ‘Why do leaves go crispy?’ – We will look at the signs of Autumn. The children will be encouraged to observe their environment and notice the changes happening around them. They will handle and explore natural objects such as leaves, conkers, fir cones. We will use these natural treasures for counting, making patterns and for arts and crafts. We will go on an Autumn walk in the local area to look for signs of Autumn. We will be baking autumn crumble and we will learn to make hedgehog bread.
For Autumn 2 our topic is “How many colours in the rainbow?” In our first topic we will be learning about colours and the Hindu festival of Diwali. We will be sorting objects into different colours and reading lots of stories about colours. We will identify different colours in our nursery setting and in the outdoor area. We will learn about how and why people celebrate Christmas. We will learn that Christmas is one of many CELEBRATIONS. We also learn about other CELEBRATIONS across the school year including DIWALI and CHINESE NEW YEAR.
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
Autumn Term: Tuesday 1st September 2026 – Friday 18th December 2026
Half Term: Monday 26th October 2026 – Friday 30th October 2026