Nursery News

All the children have settled really well back into Nursery after the half term holiday. We have had a busy few weeks and are gearing up for a few more in the run up to the holidays. We have read Stickman and lots of other books by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. The children love the story of Stickman and are getting really good at identifying the rhymes they can hear. They made their own stick people, choosing their materials and using their fine motor skills to stick and wrap. After making their stick people they then took them on their own adventures, we took photos and the children told me the story which is being made into a class book.

We have been learning about the festival of Diwali and watched some clips from CBeebies about the preparations and celebrations around this time. We have done a lot of work around a book called ‘Rama and the Demon King’ which is a tale from ancient India. The children absolutely love the story especially the parts about fighting demons. Lots of the children enjoyed acting out the story in front of the whole class. We also built a wall that stretched the entire length of our outdoor area being careful not to fall off into the ocean of sea monsters. Using clay and sequins the children made their own divas (candles). They really had to work their hands as clay is so much harder to mould than playdough.

Collaborative drawing and story-telling. “I had a dream” quotes

The children drew pictures or chose a picture about their favourite part of the tale of Rama and Sita and then re-told that part of the story. We have also made barfi, our simple version of a sweet that is eaten during Diwali.

Continuing the theme of light and darkness we read a book called ‘The night Box’. We talked about the seasons and how the days are becoming shorter and getting dark earlier. We had an interesting talk about whether we can see colours in the dark. We closed all the blinds in the room and turned the lights off. Then we lit some of the divas we made to see if it made a difference. We talked about how to be safe around fire and matches and then took turns to blow the candles out. Some children decided to make their own night boxes.

Reading ‘The Night Box’ led to a talk about which animals come out in the dark and the children were able to name several nocturnal animals.

As always we do lots of songs about numbers, shape and positional language. Each week we look at a different number and what it looks like using numerals, dice, Numicon and objects. We explore different ways of how we can make that number, (number bonds) this helps children really conserve their knowledge about the number and helps with more difficult maths later on. We are using a number line to find numbers and see which number comes before or after.

We also use lots of action songs to help language and physical development. We have also started some short yoga sessions which the children loved and were also incredibly good at.

We have cleared the small garden in nursery and have planted some daffodil bulbs and broad beans, next week we will be growing some cress.

Scooping pumpkins Night Boxes

Thank you for all the amazing autumn materials, the children have been using them in a multitude of ways and we have made a beautiful display of their transient art pictures. We are really appreciative of the sponsorship money left, please do send any last bits in and we will let you know the grand total!