Learning Objective Core


Personal, Emotional and Social Development:

The wheels on the bus: Ask the children to think about different journeys they have made, describing how they felt travelling to these places?  Who did they go with, where did they go?  Discuss turn taking like people do on a bus, how we have to be patient, discuss how this feels, ensuring that the children understand the importance of turn taking.

Little Miss Muffet: Discuss with the children any fears that they may have such as bees, wasps, loud noises etc.  Investigate ways in which these fears can be overcome.  Role play our meal times, emphasizing table manners, what each piece of cutlery is called and what it is used for.

Jack and Jill: Talk about friends and encourage the children to think about friends in other stories/rhymes/films, such as Buzz Lightyear and Woody, or the Tweenies, who are the children’s friends, encourage the children to do kind acts for their friends.  Think about when the children have hurt themselves, how did it make them feel?

Humpty Dumpty: Look at pictures of Humpty Dumpty, discuss with the children who is in the picture and ask how they think he feels sitting on the wall by himself?  Do they ever like to be alone?  Suggest ways in which the children can help each other when they feel lonely.  Work as a team to build walls together.

There was a crooked man: Ask the children if they think it was right that the man kept the six pence, what should we do if we find something, who should we seek help from?  The cat chased the mouse but they ended up living together in the house as friends, talk about treating others with kindness and respect.  The man in the rhyme walked crooked, why?  Talk about people with differing needs.

Communication and Language:

The wheels on the bus: Sing the nursery rhyme together, using actions to enhance on the words spoken.  Discuss the different places the bus could travel to and the imaginary people and creatures that might travel in a bus.  Develop the carpet area into a bus station or bus, extending the children’s play with timetables, tickets and maps.

Little Miss Muffet: Create other mini beasts using a variety of resources, posters, books and the internet. Encourage the children to create pictures of varying mini beasts and draw their faces of how they feel about each creature.

Jack and Jill: Encourage the children to think about the conversation Jack and Jill would have whilst walking to the well.  Using open ended questions about who the children have spoken to today?  What did they say to them?  What did they say to you?

Humpty Dumpty: Recite the nursery rhyme together in a large group and explore the way it rhymes.  Discuss emotions of how Humpty felt during each stage of the rhyme, have they ever felt that way.  Encourage relevant questions within large and small groups, such as how can we help others that are hurt?  What did the King’s horses do?

There was a crooked man: Recite the nursery rhyme together, missing words out, asking the children to ‘fill’ in the blanks.  Ask the children to make different crooked shapes and asking other children to describe the shapes made, using descriptive words of bent, wiggly, twisted etc.

Physical Development:

The wheels on the bus: Play follow my leader around the setting, showing spacial awareness.  Pretend to be a bus, travelling fast slow, moving left and right, stopping and going.  Use coloured bats (red and green) and encourage the children to move around the town like a bus, encouraging the children to learn which represents stop and which represents go.

Little Miss Muffet: Using gross motor skills to move around like mini beasts, crawling like spiders, floating like a butterfly, creeping like an ant etc.  Use fine motor skills to thread beads to create worms found in the garden.  Using hand and eye co-ordination to set the table for dinner.

Jack and Jill: Provide opportunities to experiment with fall down, rolling and jumping back up again, using a tambourine as a que for this action, extending this by moving around the room in different ways, hopping, skipping jumping etc.  Encourage the children to follow each other around the room, thinking about not getting too close to each other.

Humpty Dumpty: Encourage the children to move around like horses, the King’s men and Humpty Dumpty, using large motions to emphasis this, galloping like a horse, marching like the King’s men or rolling around like Humpty Dumpty.  Use a variety of large and small balls to replicate an egg, passing these around to each other, developing hand and eye co-ordination.  Discuss the speed and directions the balls are able to move.  Use balloons to extend this activity, thinking about weight of the balloon compared to the balls.

There was a crooked man: Play follow my crooked leader around the room, developing awareness of space. Using apparatus to travel over, under, through etc.  Use scissors effectively to create different patterns of cut marks. Experiment with different marks that can be made using hand and eye co-ordination.  Talk about how we can keep ourselves healthy, so that we can walk a crooked mile, observing foods that should be eaten, exercise that should undertaken etc.

Understanding the World:

The wheels on the bus: Encourage the children to use recyclable materials, card and paint to create a tabletop route for toy buses to travel around.  Include roads, building, bus stops and a bus depot, all things that can be found within the local area.  Challenge the children to think about the routes and follow directions (both spoken language and arrows).  Look at the history of past transports of horse and carts, talking about how people used to travel.  Use the Beebot to represent a bus by programming its route.

Little Miss Muffet: Encourage the children to think about where the spider may have come from; perhaps he crawled away from home.  What is the name of the spider’s home called, where would he build it and how does it help him get his food?  Use magnifiers to observe spiders in the garden, what other insects can be found?  Use the camera to take photographs of creatures found within the setting.

Jack and Jill: Replicate the actions of Jack and Jill going up and down the hill, talking about position.  Talk about who are our friends and family.  What do we do when we are with them (thinking about family traditions)?  Investigate what happened when Jack and Jill fell down, where could they have gone if they were hurt?  (Hospital), who would have helped them to get better?

Humpty Dumpty: Investigate with the children about different forms of transport, did Humpty Dumpty live today or in the past?  Encourage the children to think about eggs, where do they come from?  When do they eat eggs, at what time of day?  Explore what is inside the egg, yolk, egg whites.  Use a variety of resources to create Humpty Dumpty’s wall, including wooden blocks, cardboard boxes, and bricks.  Thinking about using these safely.  Grow cress seeds inside empty egg shells, observing growth and development.

There was a crooked man: Discuss the different environmental surrounding, including the countryside, what is this?  What can be found there?  Investigate what a stile is, encourage the children to make their own using recyclable materials.  How is the countryside the same or different from our local area?  The cat, the mouse and the man all lived together, encourage the children to talk about who lives in their houses?  Explain to the children that a six pence was money used in the past, investigate money used today, using real money to do rubbings with.  Developing this further by talking about money from all over the world, Euros, Dollars, etc.


The wheels on the bus: Encourage the children to recite numbers of people getting on and off of the pretend bus, observing if there are enough seats?  What do we do if we haven’t got enough?  Adding and subtracting when people get on and off of the bus.  Encourage the children to write tickets with numbers for the cost of buying a ticket, whilst exchanging the ticket for play money.  Provide the children with bus stencils, encouraging them to draw patterns using shapes, colours, thinking about symmetry and what a repeated pattern looks like.

Little Miss Muffet: Make different sized spiders (large, medium and small), counting how many legs a spider has, discuss how many legs they have on each side of their body.  Use a variety of basic shapes to create a picture of Miss Muffet.  Investigate the language of position used in the story.

Jack and Jill: Provide opportunities for the children to measure in a variety of ways, using tape measures to measure the height of hills, or using different sizes of buckets in the water and explore the different sizes of capacities.  Using language such as short and fat or tall and thin.  Re-enact the rhyme, encouraging the children to count how many steps it takes to climb up the hill.

Humpty Dumpty: Talk to the children about the size of the walls (tall/short, long/narrow) and how they are built.  Observe the shapes of the bricks.  Investigate if the same amount of large bricks or small bricks build the same size wall.  Count how many bricks they used to build their own walls, using a variety of sizes of bricks.  Provide a variety of construction materials for the children to experiment with, including play tools and builders clothing/safety hats.

There was a crooked man: Count the number of times the work cooked in mention in the rhyme.  Explore if the children can count up to 6 coins, show the children different types of coins, can they find some that are the same? Investigate the different ways the coins can be sorted, size, shape, number.  Count how many in each set. Encouraging the children to share the coins equally, investigating who has more, less.

Literacy Development:

The wheels on the bus: Provide mark making equipment for the children to draw their own maps, write their own tickets etc during role play activities.  Encourage children to create the initial sound of bus and the end sound, comparing these to other words with the same sound at the beginning and at the end.

Little Miss Muffet: Read stories about spiders, such as “Squash the spider”.  Observe the sounds that animals may make, using musical instruments to support this, i.e. a shake for a spider scuttling, a triangle for quiet butterfly.

Jack and Jill: Explore the sounds of what water sounds like when it’s poured or being splashed around with.  Use water outside to mark make with on the ground outside, using large paint brushes and rollers.

Humpty Dumpty: Recite the nursery rhyme together in a large group and explore the way it rhymes, what words sound the same.  Encourage rhyme and alliteration with matching items that sound the same, i.e. man and van. Talk about what parts they like or don’t like in the rhyme.  Make pretend Humpty Dumpty eggs asking the children what they can call theirs and encourage them to label their egg with their name.

There was a crooked man: Recite the nursery rhyme together, missing words out, asking the children to ‘fill’ in the blanks.  Encourage mark-making using different patterns such as zig zags, wavy lines, using a variety of equipment of pens, pencils, crayons, chalks, stencils and tracings.

Creative Development:

The wheels on the bus: Create a large collage of a bus, using a variety of recyclable materials, encouraging the children to work as a team.  Use different textured materials, describing what they feel like, rough smooth, bumpy etc.  Use small vehicles to print with paint onto textured paper, feeling the surface, whilst developing an understanding of mixing colours.  Use large, medium and small blocks to create houses in a street, with people figurines for small world play.

Little Miss Muffet: Create spiders using a variety of activities, including 2d and 3d art works.  Make paper mache to create a large spider with patterns painted onto it.  Use a variety of construction equipment to make Little Miss Muffet’s house that she can run to!

Jack and Jill: Use water within creative activities such as bubble blowing, wetting tissue paper and placing onto white paper, what happens to the white paper, do the colours mix?  Using glup to be transported around, allowing the children to change its colour using food colouring.  Using ramps and cars to replica the up and down motion, allowing the children to use own experiences of this.

Humpty Dumpty: Sing the nursery rhyme, whilst playing a wide range of musical instruments, following instructions when to play them quietly and loudly.  Create individual picture scenes from the rhyme, using shapes appropriately, such as an oval for an egg, rectangles for bricks, circle for a sun etc.  Role play the rhyme, using hobby horses and hats to enhance this.  Create pictures of Humpty Dumpty using crushed egg shells.

There was a crooked man: Draw and colour separate crooked arms and legs and attach to a crooked body using split pins.  Find some crooked or twisted things in and around the setting, such as twigs, springs and pieces of twisted clay, pasta etc.  Encourage the children to arrange to create a large modern art piece. Investigate the surroundings and go into the woodland area to make bark rubbings. Using bricks for block printing, creating repeated patterns. Encourage the children to use movements as a means of expressing how they would have felt if they were the crooked man who found a six pence, or how they would have felt if they were the mouse being chased by a cat.