Dothill Primary School

Friday 3rd October 2025

🌟 Happy Friday from the Rainbow Room! 🌟

Together we’ve shared another wonderful week of learning, playing, and exploring emotions we have had together. Our story of the week was “How Do You Feel?” and the children enjoyed lots of opportunities to recognise, talk about, and roleplay different emotions. Here’s a little peek into the areas of development we focused on:

💬 Communication and Language

The children roleplayed different emotions with adults and peers. Inside the adventure hut we have our home roleplay. Inside was some babies, food, clothes, toothbrushes and other items we use in our daily environments to maintain our wellbeing. The children thought carefully about possible solutions, learning how to help care for the babies when they felt sad, and how to keep them healthy.

📚 Literacy

In our literacy activity table we had a phonics puzzle for the children to solve. On our table activity we used play sounds and play dough to explore letters and stamping them to create letter formations. We also had access to our name learning mats to recognise and create our names in different fun ways! In our sensory tray we used the first selection of our Set 1 sounds: m, a, s, d, t. For each sound the children had a picture, a soft toy, and a real object of reference to match. This multi-sensory approach helps the children recognise, remember, and connect sounds in a fun and meaningful way.

🔢 Mathematics

In maths our speckled frog and little ducks sensory tray brought maths to life! The children recreated the song, showed numbers on their fingers, and practised counting how many frogs or ducks were left, and splashed through the water to find the matching number.

🎨 Creative Arts and Design

Children cut, stuck, and created expressive faces, learning how to place features correctly and identify emotions through their artwork.

🌍 Understanding the World

We matched real emotion visuals to Widgit emotion cards, this helped us to recognise emotions in others to process how they feel to help them. We named feelings discussed what might cause them, and explored ways to regulate our emotions.

💪 Physical Development

This week in the Rainbow Room, the children explored new equipment to support their movement and regulation skills. They practised balancing on stilts, which are fantastic for building balance, coordination, and confidence. We also introduced a fun new throwing discs game, where children aimed discs at cones a great way to develop hand–eye coordination, focus, turn taking and gross motor control. Alongside this, we introduced our wobble boards and spinning disc to offer calming strategies for those “fizzy” feelings before they pop.

🌈 Outdoors

Building on the children’s interest for colour making. We mixed used blue water and yellow water to represent different emotions, sparking discussions about how colours can match feelings. The children had opportunities to mix these in our waterfall tubes to create a new colour.

We are so proud of how the children are growing in their awareness of emotions and using this to support each other in new caring ways throughout the day. We can’t wait for more fun and learning next week! 💛

Friday 26th September 2025

🌟 Our Busy Week of Learning! 🌟 We’ve had a wonderful week exploring our theme “I Love You Every Day” 💕. The children enjoyed lots of sensory play while developing key skills across all areas of learning. Here’s a peek at our classroom adventures:

Maths

• Tracing numbers in our sensory rice tray (1, 2, 3).

• Practising number recognition and making marks in creative ways.

Literacy

• Exploring sounds and letters (m, a, s, d) in our sensory trays.

• Tracing letters and recognising the sounds they make.

Understanding the World

• Brushing teeth roleplay with animals, toothbrushes, and sensory paste.

• Talking about how and why we brush our teeth.

Physical Development

• Taking turns and sharing with our fishing game.

• Developing coordination while learning to ask for and offer help.

• Making funny faces with play dough supporting fine motor control and recognising emotions.

Communication & Language

• Roleplay with babies, looking after them and discussing feelings.

• Learning to recognise and share emotions while problem-solving together. Creative Arts & Design

• Creating self-portraits using mirrors.

• Talking about our features and celebrating what makes us unique.

Outdoors

• Continuing our self-care focus: cleaning toys, mud kitchen play, and waterplay with soap and bubbles.

• Taking responsibility and looking after our playthings together.

The children have been amazing — so much learning wrapped up in fun, giggles, and creativity! 🌈✨

Friday 19th September 2025

Another Friday has come around again! We’ve had such a happy week together, full of smiles, learning and discovery. Take a look on SeeSaw at our adventures as we explored colours, patterns, textures and our wonderful differences – just like Elmer the Elephant! 🌈 Each activity gave us the chance to celebrate what makes us unique, while having so much fun with our friends.

Friday 12th September 2025

Some of our children may remember Mr Busby, who joined us last year for some amazing adventures and guess what? He’s coming back! Starting next week, we’ll enjoy our morning adventures with Miss Turner, and in the afternoons, Mr Busby will be exploring with us again. He’s has shared just how excited he is to join us! 🎉 It’s fantastic for the children to see familiar, friendly faces they know and trust. And for our friends who joined us this year, Mr Busby is already a familiar face from his adventures in The Woodlands next door. We’re so lucky to have him back and make our learning adventures even more exciting, fun, and full of smiles!

Friday 5th September 2025

🌈 Happy Friday from the Rainbow Room! 🌈 Wow, can you believe our very first week has already flown by? We are so proud of how quickly the children have settled, adapted, and embraced their new learning space. Their enthusiasm and energy have made the Rainbow Room shine extra bright this week.

Whilst following our Autumn 1 Theme of All about me! Today, we began discussing the importance of keeping our bodies safe. We introduced Pantosauraus, a fun and friendly resource that helps children learn about their bodies, personal boundaries, and what is safe and not safe in a positive, age-appropriate way. You can explore it further above through song and read about it here to see some of the recommended tools to support sensitive topics at home. https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/media/1384/underwear-rule-parents-guide-children-autism.pdf In the Rainbow Room, some children need support from trusted adults with personal care, like toileting. These moments are important and safe, but it’s equally important for children to understand body safety. This includes recognising what is safe and not safe, and understanding that even trusted adults should follow the rules, and knowing that being told to keep a secret about their body is not safe. Talking about safe touches, trusted adults, and how to ask for help, can prevent children from feeling that they would be in trouble. Therefore, we encourage families to continue these conversations at home in a gentle, supportive way to feel safe. 🌈 By exploring these ideas both at school and at home, children can develop a clear understanding of boundaries, personal safety, and how to speak up if something doesn’t feel right—all in a positive and reassuring way. 🌟