Learning Journeys
Next week, we’d like to invite you to look at your child’s Learning Journey when you drop your child off at Nursery on Monday, Tuesday or Thursday morning from 9 until 9.30am.
We’re sure the children would love you to see how much progress they’ve made; it’s a great way to end the year and celebrate all of their hard work and learning.
We hope that you’ll be able to stay on one of the mornings, even if it’s just for 5 minutes!
Transition to Reception
Over the last few weeks, as part of their transition to Reception, our oldest children have enjoyed visiting their new classrooms to play. For their first visit, they visited when the classrooms were empty. They had a look around with a member of Nursery staff and enjoyed a story time. This week, they’ve been visiting with a few friends and getting to know their Reception teachers.
Children continue to enjoy our ‘under the water’ theme and this week, we enjoyed listening to ‘Commotion in the Ocean’ and finding out about different sea creatures.
We’ve been strengthening our finger muscles in the fiddly fingers area by squeezing pegs and adding them onto some jellyfish to make tentacles. It was a bit tricky at first and sometimes the pegs snapped but we persevered.
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In maths, we’ve been learning about capacity. We’ve been talking about when something is ‘full’ or ’empty’.
Help at home: Use these words together at home when you’re playing, in the bath or cooking. Is it full or empty? How do you know?
Not only did we find that one of our tadpoles had turned into a froglet this week, but we also found a tiny frog outside at the bottom of the garden. We enjoyed watching it hop around for a while and were surprised at how camouflaged it was in the grass.
Seaside photographs
Thank you to everyone that has sent in a seaside photograph so far. It’s not too late if you’d like to email us one photograph of your child at the seaside – we’ll look at them during snack time and talk about our favourite things to do at the seaside.
Story Trail Event
As part of the Leeds City of Culture, there is a local story trail event taking place. The flyers are below and pdfs to download.
Why not take part with friends or family in this fun event?
We like to move it, move it!
We’re always looking for ways to keep active and to keep fit in Nursery. This week, we enjoyed a bit of singing and dancing in the rain!
Children danced to the music, and had to freeze when it stopped. Each time we stopped, we tried a different balance.
In music lessons, we’ve been learning to name some instruments and to play them in time with the beat.
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be learning about the seaside. If you’ve visited the coast recently, please email us a photograph and we’ll use them to help children to talk about some of the things that we might see or do when we visit the seaside. Scholesnursery@spherefederation.org
Construction, role play & dancing!
We’ve been watching the tadpoles in our tank very closely and this week, we spotted some back legs! Next, we’re hoping to see the front legs grow.
Outside, children have enjoyed lots of role play games; the car wash and garage has been especially popular.
Here are a few other photos to show our learning this week – ranging from working out the best way to join two boxes together to building a vehicle using crates and learning to control a remote-controlled vehicle.
Have you seen our pictures on the Early Years tea towel? If you’d like to support school and help raise funds, they’re £5 each. Check your emails for more details.
Transport
Children returned to Nursery happily on Monday and enjoyed telling us about their holiday adventures. Thank you to everyone that emailed us a half term holiday photograph; children shared them with their friends at snack time and told us about their walks, bike rides and days out.
As children told us about their holidays, we ended up talking about different types of transport, including trains, boats and planes. During story times, we’ve enjoyed hearing about the adventures of ‘The Little Red Train‘ and watching a song about a magic train ride.
Children loved using the remote controlled cars this week and were able to move them backwards and forwards between the train station and garage.
In maths, we’re learning about night and day and will be moving on to ordering key events in our daily routines next week.
Help at home: Talk to your child about day and night time. What activities do people do in the day and at night? What do they do in the morning/afternoon/evening?
Reminders
- Yellow group children – Please make sure you have signed up for a Parent Consultation appointment
- On sunny days, please ensure your child is wearing suncream in the morning and has a NAMED hat and NAMED waterbottle at Nursery.
Butterflies!
The sunny weather was perfect for releasing our butterflies this week! Children enjoyed watching as their wings opened out and they began to fly around in the butterfly net. After a few days, we released them into the sunshine and loved seeing them fly away.
We talked about the symmetrical patterns on butterfly wings and in the creative area, we tried making our own butterfly prints by folding the paper in half to print the same pattern on each wing.
This week, we’ve also been learning about shapes. We’ve made shape patterns, talked about the properties of different shapes and named some of them. We used lots of words to describe shapes including curved, straight, sides, edge and corner.
Outside, we enjoyed passing the ball to each other as we practised our throwing and catching skills. We also made a car wash role play area and loved washing the wheels on our trikes. There was a lot of conversation and turn taking involved.
We hope that you all have a fantastic half term holiday and we look forward to hearing all about your adventures when we return to Nursery on Monday 05 June. If you’d like to send us a photograph of a holiday highlight, please send us an e-mail and we’ll share them in Nursery. scholesnursery@spherefederation.org
Tadpoles
Have you seen the tadpoles in Nursery? Children are fascinated watching them wriggle and swim around the tank. We’ve been learning about the life cycle of a frog and know that the next stage in the cycle is for the tadpoles to grow back legs. We keep looking at them closely to check for signs of legs.
In maths, we’ve been singing ‘5 Little Speckled Frogs‘ and have been carefully counting how many frogs are left on the log after each verse.
How many frogs jumped into the pond?
How many are on the log?
If there are 3 frogs on the log, how many are there in the pond?
In the sensory area, children loved playing in the ‘frogspawn’ (or tapioca)! It was very gloopy and had lots of tiny little jelly balls that were very tricky to hold between your fingers.
We looked at pictures of frogspawn and had a go at printing using bubble wrap. It looked just like the balls of jelly in frogspawn! In the fiddly fingers area, we used used our pincer grip to pick up the marbles and balance them on the suction pads.
Outside, children have enjoyed playing with some bats and balls. We used the bats to knock the balls of the cones and had great fun running to pick them all up again. We also practised our throwing skills; we aimed the balls at the 5 speckled frogs on the log and tried to knock them off. When we’d had our turn, we collected the frogs that we had knocked off and put them into a five frame to see how many there were.
Incy Wincy Spider
This week, children have been searching for spiders in Nursery, although not everybody liked it when we found them! We sang Incy Wincy Spider and enjoyed building a channel using the guttering to wash the spiders into the water tray outside.
We made spiders in the malleable area using playdough. First, we had to roll a ball to make the body and then we rolled sausage shapes to add on the legs. Some children managed to count 8 legs to put on their spiders!
In our phonics group time, the older children learnt a new sound – J. We looked at some objects and had to listen carefully to the sound that they started with. Can you hear a ‘j’ sound at the beginning of the word? Which is the odd one out?
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 yellow 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?
Next week, we’re looking forward to watching the chrysalides that we’ve put into the butterfly garden. Will we get to see them hatch? Watch this space!
Have you seen the tadpoles in the Rainbow room? We’ll also be learning about the life cycle of a frog and singing the number rhyme 5 Little Speckled Frogs. (This is a YouTube link. Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip).