Living and Learning : Staying Safe themed week
This week, we’re learning all about staying safe and keeping ourselves safe.
There will be visitors and a change in lessons to cover all the areas below.
Help at home by talking to your child about risks and how they can stay safe at home, in the car and out in the community.
What we will be learning – Safety Week
This week, we will be joining in with school’s safety themed week. We’ll be learning all about staying safe in lots of different situations.
The children will be helping us to carry out our daily risk assessments both inside and outside Nursery. We will be asking questions like Is the gate closed? Are the steps to the slide slippery? Are any of the toys broken?
Talking about sun safety.
Role playing crossing the road safely on our bike track.
Spotting dangers in the home.
Finding out about our emergency services.
Look out for some photos later this week.
Reminders
Nursery will close on Thursday 21 May for the half term holiday.
We will return for our final term on Monday 01 June.
Topic: Why do tourists visit Venice?
This week, we became researchers in our geography lesson and used the iPads to find out more about the beautiful city of Venice. We were trying to answer the question…
Why do tourists visit Venice?
Before beginning our research, we discussed how important it is to use trusted websites with reliable information. We know that not everything online is accurate, safe or useful. As a class, we looked carefully at different websites and decided which ones would help us answer our question best.
The children thought about who created the website, who the audience was and whether the information included facts or opinions. We decided that websites designed for children, educational websites and well-known organisations were the most trust worthy to use.
During our research, we discovered lots of interesting facts about Venice. We found out that Venice is famous for its canals instead of roads, tourists travel on gondolas and water buses and the city is made up of over 100 small islands connected by bridges. We also learned that people visit Venice to see beautiful buildings, explore St Mark’s Square and enjoy the annual Venice Carnival.
Help at home: research a famous city with your child and discuss which websites you think are trustworthy. Can you explain why some websites are more reliable than others?
Science-deciduous or evergreen?
Through our Biology lessons, KS1 have been investigating the differences between deciduous and evergreen trees. We went onto the school field to observe the leaves and trees closely. We also had many examples of different leaves brought into school to help us with our learning. Our findings were:
Evergreen trees have spikey, dark green and waxy leaves.-Oliver
If there are no leaves on the tree in Winter, it will be deciduous!-Kit
Is that why you see holly at Christmas? It’s evergreen and you can get it in Winter.-Pheobe
To stay safe as Scientists: we were very careful when handling spikey clippings. We also washed our hands after touching them.
We wanted to gather and record simple data, so we took our tree classification sheet and set out onto the field again (hooray for the dry grass!)
We can identify the tree by looking at it’s leaves. The children were thrilled to independently identify the young horse chestnut trees. We are hoping to harvest conkers from them next Autumn. The limiting factor was that our classification sheet only had 9 different types of trees on it. These Scientists wanted to accurately name every tree and every bush.
Help at home: could you help your child to identify the trees, bushes and plants in your garden or local area? The woodland trust is a good place to start. It has an A-Z of British Trees.
Mad about Minibeasts
We’ve been finding out about snails, spiders, bees and ladybirds this week. These were some of our favourite poems from our book of the week.
We used the sensory area to explore the hexagon shapes that make a bee hive and got busy weaving on the hexagon shaped mats.
We found out that spiders had eight eyes and eight legs. We made our own spiders in the dough.
We designed our own snail inspired art work following the spiral shapes on their shells.
Our chrysalides are now in the butterfly garden and we are checking them every day for any changes.
Help at home
We have been finding out lots of facts about mini beasts this half term. Ask your child if they can talk to you about what they have found out. We are sure that they will remember lots.
Poem of the week
Our poem of the week this week is called ‘Morning Rush’ and it is about getting ready on a morning. We spotted many rhyming words and some repetition.
Everyone used their prosody to show expression, with some children using body language too.
Well done, KS1.
Help at home by continuing to practise the Poem of the Week every week. This is part of our homework and is sent home every Friday.
Living and Learning – Physical health and fitness
We’ve been learning about the importance of keeping active and have discussed what this looks like on the outside and inside of our bodies! We’ve thought about how we keep active during the school day, such as during WUSU and playtimes as well as PE lessons. We’ve also thought about ways we can keep active at home, whether that’s playing a sport, running around in the garden, going to the park or simply going for a walk.
Help at home by asking your child why it’s important for our health to keep active. Could they make a diary of all the active things they do in a week?
Living and Learning – Year 3,4
In Living and Learning we have been thinking about the physical and mental benefits to our health of being physically active.
We learned that it is recommended that we should be active for one hour per day. We thought about everything we do in a day and whether these activities were ‘more active’, ‘less active’ or ‘in-active’. We then wrote our ideas on to different post-it notes and put them into groups.
We discussed what we could do take activities from one group to another – for example, whilst reading – act out scenes, do ‘character walks’, or scavenger hunts for words/items. Or, when playing board games – add movement rules (‘do 5 hops before your turn’).
Then we made a list of all the times that we are active across a week and added them up. People who had a high level of active hours across the week gave feedback to the rest of the class about how they achieve it and top tips for getting active!
We were surprised by how quickly walking/cycling to and from school, wake up shake up, break and lunchtime added up! We reviewed what the biggest ‘contributors’ were to our active minutes and found that playing at school and ‘playing out’ after school were often the biggest chunk.
Help at home: discuss with your child how you make sure you stay active to look after your physical and mental health. You could also think about if there are any new ways of being active you would like to try together.
What will we be learning – week 4
Our book of the week is a book of poems ” Mad about Minibeasts” We have been identifying rhyming words in Nursery so this book will support our leaning.
Sound of the week:
w for wave
Can you practise the sound at home?
Pucker your lips and keep them as small as you say w,w,w.
Nursery rhyme of the week:
Maths
We will continue to look for shapes in our environment. We will be talking about them and describing them using words like
straight, flat, curved, edges, corners and faces.
We will be finding out about spiders this week. Counting their legs and their eyes! We will be looking for spiders webs too.
Looking for snails and drawing their shells will help us with our mark making.
We will also be watching our chrysalides very closely next week too.
Help at home:
For children moving into Reception in September, play games like ‘I spy’ where you have to listen carefully to the initial sounds in words. Get three objects, two that begin with the same sound and one that starts with a different sound. Can they spot the odd one out and tell you why? E.g. car, cookie, banana.
For children that are in green group and will stay in Nursery next year, begin to listen to sounds around you as you’re out and about. What can children hear in their environment? Can they hear birds singing, a fridge humming, a bell ringing?
Check back later this week to find out how we got on.
Wriggly worms
We’ve been listening to the story ” Superworm ” in Nursery this week and learning through some ” worm” themed activities.
We strengthened our fingers this week by using tweezers to collect some worms in the sensory area and rolling worms in the dough. We made long and short worms.
We did try to find some minibeasts outside this week but they were keeping themselves well hidden as it was quite cold. We will keep looking next week.
Our caterpillars have been busy building their chrysalides. We’ve put them into the butterfly garden. Will we get to see them hatch? Watch this space!
We’ve been busy talking about all of the shapes around us this week. As we’ve printed with the shapes we’ve talked about their sides and corners. Did you find any shapes with flat sides at home this week?
Outside we’ve been balancing, jumping, climbing and swinging. The children loved developing their physical skills on our obstacle course.
Reminders
Nursery closes at 3pm. Please make sure you pick your child up at the end of each session on time. This is to support your child’s wellbeing, as well as support staffing arrangements.