The Woodlands

Welcome to our Year R and our Year R/1 mixed aged classes!

We are looking forward to welcoming children into their new classrooms as part of our first learning adventure this year which is called 'Once upon a time...at Netley Abbey Infant School.' We will tell our own stories of how we have changed over time, learn about our new friends and the activities we can do within The Woodlands base. Our key question to consider is: I wonder what stories you can tell? The curriculum overview for this adventure can be found here.

Year R is an exciting year where we welcome children on their school journey. This year sees children complete their early years foundation stage with experiences within the seven areas of learning that they began within their pre-school settings. We value the importance of play both indoors and outdoors as a rich context for children’s learning in which they explore the world around them, practise skills and consolidate what they have learnt. Strong and meaningful relationships are formed between staff and children allowing us to plan for each child’s individual journey. We are a three-form entry school and have up to ninety children organised into class bases of Robins, Wrens and Sparrows with family groups within these. These are:

Robins class base with Mrs Vidler and Mrs Atwell.
Wrens class base with Miss Saunders.
Sparrows class base with Mrs Davison.
Mrs Day, Miss Mitchell, Mrs Skinner and Mrs Wood also support the children in the Woodlands.

In addition to their class based experiences each week, children have PE twice a week where they will spend time in the hall or outside developing their physical skills. Children go on a fortnightly welly walk in the school grounds and have their boots in school ready to explore on any day throughout the week.

Throughout the year we use carefully chosen books to inspire our learning opportunities alongside sharing a wide range of stories, rhymes, poems and non-fiction across each week. Our Year R bookcase shows the key texts shared and will be updated over the year.

We have attached our Learning Adventure Map below to give some detail about our EYFS Curriculum. Each year we personalise the opportunities offered using the children's current interests and fascinations so the content can change.

Year R Recommended Reads

Please use the link below to access a range of recommended books to share with your Year R child. These have been carefully selected to represent a wide range of age appropriate themes.

https://www.booksfortopics.com/reception

Here is a poster view of the same books available to download.

50 Recommended Reads Reception

Year R Termly Updates 2025 to 2026

We look forward to updating you about our future experiences here.

Year R Termly Updates 2024 to 2025

What we enjoyed learning in Year R last year!

Autumn Term 2024

We are all feeling a sense of belonging to our new classes after completing our first learning adventure ‘Belonging at Netley Abbey’. The children have settled amazingly into school life at Netley Abbey and we are so proud of them for learning so much about their new school. Everyone enjoyed a tour of the school and meeting other members of the school community. We were wonderful photographers taking photos of interesting places and people around the school building. We have shared stories about starting school and a book called ‘Super Duper You.’ The children have been able to tell us about their super abilities and what they can do. After listening to the story of ‘Once there were giants’ we looked at our baby photos and talked about how we have changed. We welcomed babies and grandparents into our classrooms to hear about life at different ages. In our key person groups we have spent time learning each others names and finding out more about each other. We wonder what you enjoy about belonging to Netley Abbey Infant School?

The curriculum overview for this adventure can be found here.

Year R were super explorers in launching our new learning adventure with our very first welly walk around school. We looked for creatures that live in the woods and found some mini-beasts and birds. In literacy we read the book ‘Who’s hiding in the woods’ and found out some information about woodland animals. We made our own class version of the book by drawing and labelling an animal hiding in the woods. We went on further welly walks to explore autumn and also completed our sponsored welly walk. Thank you to everyone who sponsored us for this, we are looking forward to adding to our Year R experiences. After reading ‘The Gruffalo’ we used different art media to draw the characters from the story. In P.E. we enjoyed taking part in a Gruffalo dance, using our imaginations to move through the Gruffalo’s deep, dark wood. When learning the story of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ we made and ate our own porridge, it was very yummy! Our adventure ended with a walk to Westwood with many of our grownups from home joining us to share some songs in the woods. We wonder how the woodlands will change over the coming weeks?

The curriculum overview for this adventure can be found here.

Our final learning adventure of the autumn term ‘Let’s Celebrate’ allowed us to learn about special events that happen at this time of year. We were excited to be invited to our class character Lee’s fifth birthday party in school and enjoyed celebrating this event with each other. We thought about our own birthdays and what we do at these special times. A Nativity set arrived in our classroom with a book called ‘The Christmas Promise.’ We listened to the story alongside the Nativity story and chose parts to play in our own retelling of the Christmas story on the stage. Our families joined us in decoration making afternoon to ensure we could make our classrooms look fantastic for the festive season. Mrs Cutler heard about our celebrations and brought us a Christmas card and a book called ‘Joy to the World’. We read about how Christmas is celebrated in lots of different countries and used Google Earth to locate these places. We celebrated all we had learnt by having a Christmas party that we planned together including our party clothes, a party snack and lots of party games. We wonder how you will enjoy celebrating special events over the coming weeks?
We wish everyone happy celebrations over the holidays. The curriculum overview for this adventure can be found here.

Do you have a favourite nursery rhyme? We have enjoyed learning lots of new nursery rhymes this half term as well as sharing our favourite ones. We began our learning with some winter rhymes and explored the season through a winter walk in the school grounds. Mrs Power came in and taught us Makaton signs for some nursery rhymes, including Jack and Jill and Miss Polly had a dolly. We enjoyed changing the dolly in this rhyme to an animal to make up our own version of the rhyme. As part of winter well-being we have learnt something new, moved in different ways and shared stories with our families. We have listened to rhymes from different countries in different languages and joined in with learning some new words. We have explored building a bridge for Dr Foster and moving water in a different way for Jack and Jill as part of our STEM week. We enjoyed a visit from a scientist to talk about bacteria and learnt something new about the good and bad bacteria there is. We wonder if there is a new nursery rhyme you could learn at home? The curriculum overview for this adventure can be found here.

During this learning adventure we celebrated World Book Day through listening to a range of stories and poems. We enjoyed dressing up as book characters and sharing our favourite books. We have listened to traditional tales where characters run, including ‘The Three Little Pigs’ and ‘The Gingerbread Man’. We retold the stories, sequenced the main events and wrote down our ideas. We baked some gingerbread man biscuits to help the little old lady and loved taking them home to try. In the story ‘Keep Running Gingerbread Man’ the story changes when the Gingerbread Man manages to get away and we thought about where he may run to including other countries around the world. On a local area walk we followed clues about where the Gingerbread Man had been around Netley and chose the perfect house for the Three Pigs to move into that would not blow down. The Gingerbread Man had been keeping fit to run so fast, so we talked about the ways we stay healthy and well. In maths we identified odd and even numbers and doubled amounts. We thought about stories Jesus told as part of our R.E. learning and what we can learn from a story.

We wonder which books you enjoy sharing at home?

The curriculum overview for this adventure can be found here.

Our school trip to Sir Harold Hillier Gardens launched this learning adventure and we loved looking for signs of growth throughout the gardens. We looked for items that do not belong in the gardens, hunted for mini-beasts under the trees and created sticky caterpillars in the sensory garden. We found some seeds in the classroom and everyone planted their own sunflower seed to talk home for a sunflower competition. We wrote instructions on how to plant a seed for our friends and talked about what a seed needs to grow. Mad about Minibeasts provided us with some poetry about different bugs and we chose which one we would like to make into a clay model. On World Bee Day we dressed up as minibeasts to celebrate our learning, we shared our country dancing on the playground before looking for mini-beasts that live in the school grounds. In our maths, we explored manipulating shapes into different positions to create pictures including making Tangram puzzles. We continued exploring numbers to twenty and beyond, looking for patterns in what we noticed.

We wonder what you have noticed growing in the world around you?

The curriculum overview for this adventure can be found here.

This half term our learning adventure has been ‘Make a Splash’. We have really enjoyed this learning adventure, finding out lots of information about the sea and the creatures that live there. The curriculum overview for this adventure can be found here. We wrote our own creature reports about a sea creature and explored capacity with water. It was lots of fun playing in the water and learning how to stay safe in the sea and rivers on beach day. We also enjoyed the story, ‘The Rainbow Fish’, each making a scale saying why we are special, to then make a Rainbow Fish picture to take with us to Year One. We then walked the Rainbow Fish to the shore and drew a map to help him find his way- thank you to all the adults that joined us. Our sports day was great too, thank you to everyone that came to watch!