Nursery and Reception

At Hollingwood Primary School, our Early Years environment is a vibrant hub of learning and exploration, meticulously crafted around our young learners. Rooted in our enquiry-based curriculum, it nurtures curiosity and creativity, fostering a love for learning. We prioritise the child's individuality, creating a supportive atmosphere where they thrive academically and emotionally, laying a strong foundation for their future education.

What we offer in Early Years:

Dough Disco

Dough Disco is a high tempo, high energy session with play dough. Designed to encourage maximum participation the sessions are created for all levels of ability. Children develop fine motor muscles by manipulating the dough in a variety of ways, which in turn helps to improve their mark making and writing. If you wanted to have a go at home, there are some videos on you tube you can try, or simply put on your favourite music and dough dance away!

Here are some of the Dough Disco moves;

• Squeeze (small portions for smaller hands);
• Pat;
• Poke – using all your fingers one at a time;
• Squash into a pancake;
• Tear;
• Twist;
• Roll into a ball;
• Roll into a sausage;
• Pinch;
• Use tools to make patterns – these can include household tools such as knives and forks, potato mashers, cookie cutters etc.

Squiggle Whilst you Wiggle

Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle is an early writing program created by a Shonette Bason-Wood, who also created the program Dough Disco. Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle incorporates dance, music and large movements to help children develop the fine muscle control they need for writing.  They will learn a new gross motor movement to a piece of music while holding 'flappers' (bits of fabric) while dancing along to the music. The children then transfer these movements to floor level and swap their flappers for writing tools (crayons/pens etc) to make marks, this could be in foam, on paper, in sand etc.  They will then use this action to think of letters they can form that use this shape.  These sessions are great fun but most importantly help your child to be confident mark makers.

Shonette Bason-Wood is incredibly fun, motivating and excites the children to engage in this program. Its all about mark making and Shonette will show you how to develop children's writing in a fun and exciting and extremely active way.  

Aims and objectives of Squiggle Whilst you Wiggle

• To begin to show control in their use of tools and equipment.
• To look at the marks they are making and explore making a wider variety of marks.
• To experiment with tools and resources, mark making in many different resources with a variety of tools.
• To understand they can create simple pictures by putting different marks together.
• To create movements on a large scale.
• To understand that some marks have a meaning.
• To talk about the marks the children have made, describe and discuss them.
• To use anti-clockwise movements.
• To begin to form recognisable letters and shapes.
• To develop gross motor muscles and thereby increase control over writing tools.

The kinds of movements children learn during the session (these can be done to any music that suits the movement, feel free to experiment) are;

• Up and down (l, t, f, k, i, j);
• Side to side (t, f);
• Circles (p, d, b, e, o, a, c, g, q);
• Arches and scoops (like a rainbow) (n, m, h, u, y, r);
• Diagonals crossing the body (v, w, x, z);
• The number eight. (s, 8).