We have also been learning the story The Enormous Turnip and have done lots of work around this story. We have been role playing and acting out the story using actions and re-telling the story using a story map. We have also changed parts of the story and made our own story to retell the new story to our friends.
As part of our minibeast theme we have listened to the story The Hungry Caterpillar and tried some new snacks of our own, including melon, grapefruit and salami!
The children enjoyed learning about Superheroes so much last week that we are carrying on with their interests this week.
We are reading the Superworm books and have learnt all about the superpowers that he has. We are then challenging them to make their own mini-books about Superworm or a superhero of their choice.
We are making worm necklaces and bracelets; practising tricky threading of pasta tubes.
We are also using non-fiction books to find out more about real life worms and other insects. We learnt about the kind of places they like to live in. We then had a go at making our own ‘bug hotels’ to take home to see if we can attract some more bugs into our gardens.We then had an amazing visitor into nursery to show us some awesome giant bugs and reptiles – Guy from ‘Bugs N Stuff’. The children were so patient and brave as they waited and then held the creatures that he had brought.
Week Ending Friday 3rd May
We have had a super time in Early Years this week. Our new children have settled so well and our ‘kindness pot’ is overflowing with coins now thanks to our kind and helpful children – well done everyone!
This week we have been very busy using our superhero powers to save the nursery classroom from bad guys. We have been making superhero outfits, superhero badges and models.
We have also started doing some work for our ‘Magical Mysteries’ topic. We have played hide and seek to help us find our missing friends, found fairy families and explored patterns and tower building. We will be continuing this theme for the rest of this term.
Week ending 26th April 2019
Welcome back after the Easter holidays; we hope you all managed to get out and about to enjoy the lovely weather we had. The children have come back with lots of lovely stories about what the Easter bunny brought them and trips out.
This week we have started a superheroes theme. We are looking at superheroes from not only TV, books and films; but also ‘everyday’ superheroes. We have looked at people that do special jobs such as policemen and firemen and why they are superheroes. We have also talked about what might make us superheroes – what kind, brave or special things can we do?
We also have some new faces in nursery this week – some new children are starting with us this term and are visiting with their parents this week. We also have a student teacher; Miss Smales, starting her final teaching placement with us from the Gateshead SCITT programme.
This week we have all been excited by the newest members of nursery – out tank of frogspawn and tadpoles! We have looked closely at them to see what shape they are and what they do in their tank. We have been amazed by how quickly some of them are changing and growing into wriggly tadpoles. We have learnt that they will turn into froglets next and then into frogs.
We have read fiction and non-fiction books to find out more about them and to look at pictures of what they will look like. We have made life cycle headbands to practise sequencing the changes that happen between frogspawn and frogs.
We have also been talking more about Spring and looking at what we can see in Spring – daffodils, tulips, chicks, lambs and Easter eggs!
We have continued our Three Billy Goats Gruff work by acting out the story using the stage and props and we have made models of boats and aeroplanes that the children thought they could use to escape the troll!
This week we have enjoyed looking at patterns. We have read lots of books with different patterns in such as Elmer the colourful elephant and ’10 Black Dots’. We have made repeated patterns, painted our own Elmer’s and made spotty and stripy pictures.
After reading ‘Jaspers Beanstalk’ we also had a go at planting seeds in our own mini greenhouses – have a look in the classroom windows, they look great!
We have also enjoyed PE sessions, playing super-fast stopping and starting games.
Our new Talk For Writing book is The Three Billy Goats Gruff – we have made maps to tell the story with actions to try and remember the important parts. See if your child can remember what the goats or the troll say!
Week Ending Friday 8th March.
We have had a fantastic week celebrating books, reading and story-telling as well as World Book Day. We had lots of fun during World Book Day and all our character outfits looked amazing!
We have also had a great time celebrating Pancake Day! We made pancakes and talked about what we are celebrating. Our pancakes were yummy!
During this week, the children have shared their favourite stories with us and we have enjoyed sharing our favourite stories with them.
We have also used story dice which characters, settings and props on to help make up our own stories. We used the stories we know already to help give us ideas and then we made our stories into books! We are all really good story tellers now!
Week Ending 1st February.
We have had lots of fun this week with our Muck, Mess and Mixtures topic. We have carried out scientific experiments like finding different ways to melt ice, how to make the best jelly and how to make mud pies!
We used salt, our hands and fingers, cold water and warm water to try to melt the ice. We had great fun seeing who could melt their ice the fastest.
And we found that mud pies are easy to make but if you put too much water in them they won't stay as pies!
We have also been on lots of piratey adventures and made some yummy Pirate Pizza! We have made and followed treasure maps to find pirate treasure. We have read about the adventures of Pirate Pete and what it takes to be a pirate and we have made boats and sailed away to desert islands outside.
What a great week!
We also joined in with the RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch by going on our own bird spotting hunt around our school grounds. We tried to count and write down how many birds we saw. To entice more birds into our school, we also made bird feeders; some children also made one to bring home to put in their gardens.
As part of our Muck, Mess & Mixtures topic we tried a fun science experiment to make fizzy ice! We used vinegar, food colouring, ice and baking powder to watch how they reacted together.
With the cold weather, we have also been experimenting with freezing lots of different liquids to see what happens and how they melt; we have used jelly, coloured water, shaving foam, and trapped dinosaurs and Lego people in ice mountains.
We have had a lovely week in Nursery this week.
We read our new ‘Talk for Writing’ story, The Little Red Hen, and we thought about how we can help our friends and work as a team.
We showed off our teamwork skills by trying to move all our key worker groups across the yard without being eaten by crocodiles! We had lots of fun and worked really well together.
We have also been showing our caring side by practicing our nursing skills in the Dr surgery role play area. The children have been carefully monitoring heart rate, sore arms and sore ears and making sure our patients are very well looked after.
We began our new topic this week called ‘Muck, Mess and Mixtures’. We will be looking at lots of different ways of making and mixing things; we started by making our own milkshakes from scratch with fruit and ice cream – they were yummy! We watched videos about where milk comes from and how it gets into the little milk cartons that we get for snack.
We also started a new gross motor programme this week which focuses on big physical skills such as running, hopping, jumping and bat and ball skills. We practised rolling and dribbling balls this week.
In maths we looked at number recognition and in particular the number ‘1’. We learnt the mantra:
‘’start at the top and down we run, that’s the way we make a one.’’
…to help us to remember how to write the number 1.
Week of 19th November
This week in nursery we been celebrating National Nursery Rhyme Week. We have enjoyed, joined in with, acted out and danced to lots of nursery rhymes this week. It’s been lovely to see how many songs we already know and it’s been great sharing new ones with our friends.
We have also been retelling the story of ‘Dear Zoo’ using actions and pictures to help us remember the story. We also got a letter on Wednesday saying some animals escaped from the zoo and hid in our wood area. Thankfully we found them all and returned them safely!
Another thing we’ve been doing is comparing the sizes of animals saying whether they are big or small, then we measured ourselves using the measuring chart in class and talked about being taller or shorter.
Week Beginning 5th November 2018.
This week in nursery we have been talking about bonfire night and it’s been lovely hearing about the children’s experiences of bonfire night and all about the bonfire and the colours of fireworks they saw in the displays.
Using bonfire night as inspiration, we have drawn colourful chalk and glitter firework pictures and created firework class paintings using natural resource, during our Welly Wednesday activities.
During the afternoons, we have put our balance, agility and throwing and catching skills to the test by completing an obstacle course in the yard. We have been practising our jumping, hopping, crawling and playing catch.