Manager’s Corner

J U N E 2 0 1 5

D A T E S F O R

D I A R Y !

Monday 22nd June—Father’s Day Stay & Play— All important men in your little one’s lives are warmly invited for a Stay and Play session. We will focus on Den Building for our theme! Please feel free to bring in any boxes, wood, fabric or things that you used to use to build dens when you were young! There will also be a drink and a Yorkie awaiting you in the hall! We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible for our sessions. The sessions will be from 9.00—10.00am and 2.30 –3.30pm.

Monday 29th June — Interna-tional Mud Day Stay & Play!— With all our exciting outdoor learning we cannot wait to cele-brate the fun we have in nature! Everyone is invited to a Play & Stay session to celebrate the importance of mud! Activities will focus around our wonderful mud kitchens and planting. Please come dressed prepared to get messy! We hope to see as many of you as possible! Sessions will be from 9.00—10.00 am or 2.30—3.30 pm.

Thursday 2nd July—Miss Rob-erts’ Class Trip to the Zoo! —Information has already been distributed on a separate letter. Please speak to a staff member or ring the office if you have any queries.

Friday 10th July—Miss Rob-ert’s Class Sports Day—Children will attend a Sports Day with our sister Nursery and Prep School at Monton Cricket Club—please look out for further de-tails on a separate letter soon!

Monday 13th July—Miss Rob-erts’ Summer Play—Our wonder-ful top class have worked very hard putting together an end of school year play –Mrs Wishy Washy! Some children from the school will also be joining us to showcase some of their Summer Production. This showing will start at 2.30 pm. Look out for information closer to the time.

Tuesday 14th July—Miss Rob-erts’ Summer Play—Our wonder-ful top class have worked very hard putting together an end of school year play –Mrs Wishy Washy! Some children from the school will also be joining us to showcase some of their Summer Production. This showing will start at 9.30 am. Look out for information closer to the time.

Younger

Squirrels

Newsletter

We re so happy at Monton Village to finally see some sunny, bright weather and we have certainly been busy making the most of it in our outdoor pro-vision! A large number of our staff attended a Sat-urday training course focusing on Natural Play in the Outdoors delivered by renowned expert, Jan White. This was an amazing course and has really inspired our setting to develop and improve our gar-den areas. Since then staff have been hard at work resourcing lots of open ended, natural materials for the children to play with. If you have any items you could donate to support us in developing the garden areas please do not hesitate to bring them in; it really would be hugely appreciate! Items could be pots, pans, utensils, bakeware, crates, pallets, fab-ric, spare wood, laminate flooring sheets, spare drainage, cable drums, plants, gardening tools etc...we will make the most of anything donated! We are pleased to say that so many children abso-lutely love being outside as much as possible over the day. We are very lucky to have lots of new snazzy waterproof outfits for the children in every group and the children have loved splashing in the rain and puddles in them. However, we kindly ask that all parents provide a named pair of wellies for their child to prevent shoes from getting sodden, or children being kept in! Likewise, we have enjoyed a few days of sunshine in the past month and we kindly ask that named sunhats are provided to pro-tect your little one from the sun and heat. Thanks in advance for your support! A quick reminder that lots of lovely photos and re-minders of events can be found on our brilliant Fa-cebook Page—remember to check in and see wat we have been getting up to! Miss Bagnall Since our last write up our little squirrels have en-

joyed engaging in lots of messy activities! We have been developing our fine and gross motor skills through ball painting activities, incredible edible painting, picking up collage materials be-tween our finger and thumbs and lots of other messy activities such as slime play and moon sand with containers to encourage filling and emptying! It has become apparent that our little ones love nothing more than exploring the play phones, mod-elling early role play through saying ‘hiya’. So in the next few weeks we will be engaging in activi-ties that will help develop this through exploring our new role play items such as bags, phones, bas-kets and brushes. Also dropping, posting and empting objects is another favourite for our little ones which we will be encouraging via different sized boxes with bright colours and posting holes! Father’s day! We will be carrying out lots of Fa-ther’s day activities ready for our squirrels to take home! These will range from salt dough hand prints, poems and cards made unique by each child for our fathers to treasure! It is always a proud moment to see our little ones learn and develop with each activity and nursery day!

Natural Play Outdoors with Jan White—Amanda, Sarah, Stef, Dan-ielle A, Jen, Sam, Hannah, Sharon, Pagan, Rebecca, Ann, Kayleigh, Jade

& Miss Bagnall

A huge congratulations to Amanda Hall and Sharon Fell for successfully com-

pleting their NVQ Level 2 in Childcare—well done! Lots of hard

work, but most cer-tainly worth it—well

done from everyone at Monton Village!

Finally—good luck to Natasha and Morgan who will be starting their

maternity leave—we wish them the best

of luck and hope that they have a wonderful time with their little ones when they come!

Staff Development &

Training

There has been lots of changes made to the look of our room which I hope you enjoy as much as our Squirrels do. They now have a secret sensory corner where they have the opportunity to explore the mirrors and look at reflections of themselves and their friends. Our team enjoy pulling lots of funny faces with the children in the mirrors so expect the actions to be copied in coming weeks! They also have lots of materials to ex-plore, children love the scrunchie paper and popping the bubble wrap but any other textures your child particularly enjoys exploring at home feel free to bring that in and add it to our basket. We have enjoyed our topic of ‘Dear Zoo’ and had lots of fun creating dis-play work and pictures to take home to show our families. We have had lots

of fun playing in our make believe frog pond, this has been our favourite activity as it

was the messiest! With the weather warming up this gives us the opportunity to get lots of water play out and explore animals and creatures which live under the sea so what better topic to learn about than ‘The Sea’. We will be creating lots of pictures for children to take home and display around the room and learn just how to make the beautiful marks on the ani-mals using our fingers. Older Squirrel’s team would like to thank all parents who have brought in a picture of their child playing at the park and they are now being displayed proudly on our park display. Keep looking on the displays for art work created by your child as I am sure they will be on show very soon!

Older Squirrels

Last half term we were learning all about the now famous ‘Mrs Wishy Washy’ and the children thorough-ly enjoyed it! The children dressed up as Mrs Wishy Washy in their aprons and headscarves, scrubbed the animals so that they were nice and clean and we completely trans-formed our house into Mrs Wishy Washy’s barn. The children will be continuing to focus on the story ‘Mrs Wishy Washy’s farm’ during this term since our summer play is going to be based on it! During the Summer term the chil-dren will be learning about zoo animals and how to look after ani-mals in the zoo. We will be going on a school trip on the 2nd July to help us learn more about zoo ani-mals. The children want to learn about where the animals live and how they are cared for so hopeful-ly by the end of the term they will be filled with the knowledge they will need to be a zookeeper! If you have any books about zoo animals/wild animals please bring them in to share during circle time, since the children are enjoying sharing their favourite stories with the

class. We will be singing songs and rhymes such as 'We're going to the Zoo, Zoo, Zoo', 'Old Macdonald had a Zoo', making puppets, props, story boards, zoo role play, discussing what animals are small, tall, huge, big, discussing the sounds that different animals make and lots, lots more!

Miss Roberts’

This term we have looked at bugs that we have found in the garden, especially ‘Sammy’ our snail. We have been creating spots with black play dough to decorate our ladybird play dough mats. We have also been busy trying to create nice big towers made out of junk modelling boxes. During circle time we have been using colour flashcards where we have been building on our colour recognition and we are all doing so well! We have welcomed some more children in to our class and they are all settling in very well and enjoy being in The Village class. Next term we are going to be look-

ing at the seaside and creating lots

of pictures to take home that con-

nect to the seaside and our experi-

ences that we have had at the beach.

We are also going to look at the first

stage of jolly phonics, where we can

learn the letters and their sounds

through creative activities and sing-

ing their letter songs. The first 6

sounds are s, a, t, p, i & n.

The Village

Last half term we learnt a lot of new things about mini beasts! We spent lots of time out in the garden hunting for them and watching the way they move and what they eat etc. Some of us were very brave and held/touched some bugs on our hunts. We did lots of creative activi-ties creating our own pictures of mini beasts to take home. We also enjoyed learn about the different life cycles of animals e.g. a butterfly. This term we are going to be learning about ‘On the farm’, we will learn about all the differ-ent animals we find at the farm and what their babies are called. We will also be learning about other things we find

on a farm e.g. machinery. We can’t wait to make the most of our outdoor space and will be developing it over the next few months to add new fea-tures. We will be spending lots of time exploring our mud kitchen and begin-ning to work to-gether to build dens.

Miss Darvill’s