Our Autumn Term Project is ‘Our World!’
Children use their own ideas and imagination to make sense of the world around them. When children are free to select resources and imitate roles and experiences from everyday life, they are able to explore sense and nonsense, reality and fiction whilst gaining an understanding of society and culture.
Understanding the World is one of the four specific areas of learning in the EYFS framework. It involves guiding children to make sense of their physical world and their community through opportunities to explore, observe and find out about people, places, technology, and the environment.
In order for children to start to understand our world, they need plenty of opportunities for first-hand experiences so that they can make connections, re-enact and imagine.
As part of this project, we can embrace:
- Care for our planet – including recycling and gardening activities
- Language, costume, religions and festivals – with activities such as looking at artefacts from around the world eg African instruments or masks, bells, sari material. Looking at different national or religious costumes and head coverings. Talking about festivals and celebrations from other countries.
The children can try making clay pots, print making and weaving.
- Travel – including world maps, globes and atlases
This can include discussions about different countries of the world that the children may have visited or have family connections with.
We can also include different types of transport such as planes, trains, boats, lorries, cars and even rockets!
- Foods from around the world – tasting different traditional dishes from other countries such as sushi, pasta and croissants.
We can also incorporate cookery activities which are always extremely popular with the children
- People and their occupations – including those who work in our local community such as police officers, train drivers, hairdressers, builders, shop keepers etc
- Our prehistoric world – including dinosaurs! Always extremely popular with the children.
- Space – teaching children about space sparks imagination and ignites curiosity. It’s all about the unknown, the ‘what ifs’ and the fascinating questions. It helps children become creative thinkers. It’s exciting, engaging and enthralling, and even Peppa Pig went into space!
Our project this term encourages many developing skills such as investigation, problem-solving, memory, nature, science, history, geography, thinking skills, emotional intelligence and understanding of cultural diversity.
Learning to respect the perspectives of others build friendships and increases an understanding of the world we live in and our sense of belonging to our community.
As usual, we will be led by the children and our project will develop to include activities that cater for their own requests for topics and interests.
They take great delight in learning about other people’s countries and cultures and we would welcome any input from our families who may have connections in other parts of the world. If you have any ideas about things that we might be able to include in this ‘Our World’ topic, do please speak to a teacher.
