Wanted – Baby photographs!
Next week, we’ll be learning all about growing up and looking at how we change as we get older.
It would be great if we could look at some photographs of children when they were babies and toddlers. If you are able to, please send us an email with a photograph of your child as a baby and a toddler. We’ll use these in group time and will also look at them in Nursery throughout the week. scholesnursery@spherefederation.org
World Book Day
It’s been an eventful first week back with both ‘Pancake Day’ and World Book Day!
We loved all of your super costumes and enjoyed reading some of your favourite stories. Here are a few snaps for you to enjoy spotting our favourite characters!
In maths, we’ve been learning about the number 3. There are lots of stories involving the number three, we read some of them as part of our World Book Day celebrations. Can you think of any?
In group time, we looked at 3 spots on a dice, 3 counters on a five frame and spotted that there were 3 corners and sides on a triangle. We all collected three things from around the room and counted them carefully to check that we’d all found 3. Have a look to see if you can find groups of three things around your home. Can you spot the number three on any house doors or number plates? We also liked watching this song all about the number 3.
Here are a few other activities that we’ve enjoyed this week.
Before the holiday, as part of their music sessions, children enjoyed making their own musical instruments. We hope that you had as much fun playing them as we did!
Reminders
- Please check your emails and remember to book an appointment for our Parent Teacher Consultations that will take place soon. Please refer to your email for more details.
Goodbye and good luck!
Sadly, Mrs Crompton will be leaving us on Friday to start a new job, closer to her home. We’d like to say thank you to Mrs Crompton for all of her hard work in Nursery over the last few years and we know that she will be missed. We wish her lots of luck in her new job.
Thank you and good luck, Mrs Crompton!
Shrove Tuesday
We had a great first day back at Nursery; it was Shrove Tuesday so we enjoyed making and eating pancakes at snack time. Children enjoyed mixing the ingredients together and watching Mrs Beesley cook them and flip them in the pan. We learnt a new rhyme as we cooked them. Can you say it together at home the next time you have pancakes?
Mix a pancake, stir a pancake, pop it in the pan. Fry a pancake, toss a pancake, catch it if you can!
Happy faces
This week, as part of our Expressive Arts and Design curriculum, we’ve re-visited learning to draw ourselves. We used mirrors to look at our faces and talked about what shape we needed to draw on the paper first. We then looked at our features and tried to add more details to our drawings such as hair, ears and eyes. Some children added tiny little lines for eye lashes and drew spirals for curly hair.
Have a go at home together. Can you draw each other? Start with a circle shape for your face and then add in some features.
You might have also spotted some funny faces on the table and window! We talked about some of the different faces that we make when we feel happy, sad, worried or angry and used iPads to take selfies of ourselves! In our loose parts area, we used the resources to create some of these faces with our friends. What could you use for the eyes? How would you make a sad face?
At the beginning of the week, children enjoyed some ‘red’ themed activities as there was a lot of excitement around Valentine’s Day. We cut out different sized heart shapes in the dough area and decorated them with crystals, we used mini hole punchers in the fiddly fingers area and there was a lot of activity in the mark making area as children created their own cards and signed their names.
We’ve also been busy building dens and obstacle courses with tunnels and slides in the Sunshine Room as the windy weather prevented us from being outside at the start of the week. In our small world area, we worked together to draw some roads and create a city to drive the cars around.
We hope that you all enjoy half term and we’ll see you on Tuesday 01 March when Nursery opens. Remember, we are closed on Monday for a Training Day.
If you’d like to send us a photograph of your favourite holiday activity or if your child wows you with something that they achieve during the week, please e-mail us. scholesnursery@spherefederation.org
Reminder – WORLD BOOK DAY
It’s World Book Day on Thursday 03 March and if your child chooses to, they can dress up as one of their favourite book characters and bring a copy of their favourite book to school. Please refer to the earlier school email for more details. Also, please be mindful of typical Nursery activities when choosing a costume – children need to be able to play both inside and outside comfortably and safely and they also need to be able to access the toilet easily in their costumes!
Please make sure you write their names on their books so that they make it home again for bed time.
Safety week
This week, we joined in with school’s safety themed week. We’ve been learning all about staying safe in lots of different situations, such as online safety and road safety.
We spotted things around Nursery that could be dangerous and talked about the things that we can do at school to stay safe, such as keeping the floor clear of toys so that we don’t trip, locking the Nursery gate to keep us safe and putting cones on our playground when the play equipment is too slippy to use. We also spotted things that could be dangerous in our homes.
During group time, we played a subitising maths game on our iPads. Before we did this, we talked about ways to stay safe whilst using technology at home such as making sure that we are near a grown up and using apps and games that our parents and carers have said are ok for us to play. We also agreed that we’d tell someone if we saw any thing that we didn’t like pop up on our screens.
On Tuesday, we had a special visitor in Nursery. Sue, our school crossing assistant, came to talk to us about how she helps to keep us safe on the road near school and about other things that we can do to stay safe when we’re walking near roads. We looked at Sue’s lollipop ‘stop’ sign and talked about why she wears a very bright coat. How is it different to Mrs Long’s coat?Outside, we made our own signs and made sure our Nursery roadway was safe as people played on the trikes.
Later in the week, we had some more special visitors…
Some firefighters came to visit and showed us some of the features of their fire engine. We were very lucky and got to try on their helmets and to hold the hose. The siren was very loud! We also talked about the ways they can help people who get into danger.
Talk to your child about keeping safe at home and about road safety. What can they remember? Can you think of some other ways to stay safe when trying different activities such as swimming or going to the park?
Happy New Year!
This week, we’ve enjoyed learning about the Chinese and Lunar New Year. We used non-fiction books to learn more about how some people like to celebrate across the world and we also watched these ‘Let’s celebrate‘ videos to find out about how some families in England prepare for the celebrations.
Children created their own ‘good luck’ banners by painting patterns on to red paper and during group time, we made paper lanterns. There was a lot of interest in our New Year topic table, with children enjoying looking at the paper dragons, fortune cookies and chop sticks. In the sensory area, we explored the texture of dry noodles and found out what happened when we added hot water. Our fingers also got a good work out as we tried to use the chopsticks to pick the noodles up.
We found out that some people like to give good luck cards and red envelopes containing money to their friends and family during the festival. In our maths area, we practised our subitising and counting skills as we counted out the correct number of coins to match the number/dots on each envelope. Some children really enjoyed this and went on to make their own coins and envelopes in the creative area.
One of the favourite activities from this week, had to be creating our own dragon dance. At the beginning of the week, we watched some dragon dancing and afterwards, children began to experiment using fabric and instruments to create their own interpretation of the dance. We practised walking together in a line and then introduced moving our bodies higher and lower in time to the music.
By the end of the week, we’d created our own dragon head and had perfected our dragon dance!
Finally, we also talked about the recent very windy weather. We listened to songs about the wind and waved ribbons using large arm movements to create shapes and watch the ribbons dancing in the wind.
What is ice?
On Tuesday morning, we arrived to a very cold Nursery and our garden was covered in frost and ice. When we went outside, children had lots of questions to ask about the frost, but nobody seemed too sure about how it had got there and where it went in the afternoon when the sun came out.
There was talk of snow, Jack Frost visiting and that it had fallen from the sky and that it ‘melted’ but children couldn’t explain what ‘melting’ means. We talked about lots of different things – ice, snow, frost, rain, water, freezers and melting and children were keen to investigate.
We looked at some ice from the freezer and predicted what would happen to it if we kept it out of the freezer in a bowl. Children suggested that the sun might make it melt and another child suggested that hot water might make it melt. We left some ice in our classroom, some in the sun outside and we also added hot water to some ice, too. We talked about how it changed and what happened to the ice in the different places. After lots of discussion, and after noticing that it melted in our hands as well, we worked out that when ice gets warmer, it melts and becomes water.
Why do we sometimes have ice in the Nursery garden in the morning? Children had lots of ideas and we decided to set up an experiment to see what would happen if we put some water in different containers over night. We also looked around the garden to find some natural objects to add into the water.
When we returned to Nursery on Wednesday, nothing had happened! We still had cups and pots of water. Why didn’t we have any ice? We tried again on Wednesday night, and on Thursday morning, we were very excited to find some ice. Again, after lots of discussion and ideas, we agreed that it had to be very, very cold at night for the water to freeze and turn into ice.
Have a go at making some ice at home. What do you need to do? Where do you need to put it? Ask your child to help you fill an ice cube tray with water and put it in the freezer. Check on it a few times the same day. Has anything happened? Leave it over night. What has happened to the water in the tray? Why? What does the freezer do?
Children have enjoyed reading ‘Dinosaur Roar’ this week, so we’ll continue with their interest in dinosaurs next week. We’ll be weighing dinosaur bones, investigating dinosaur footprints and drawing eyes, horns and sharp claws to create our own, fearsome dinosaurs.
Identity Day
Nursery is not taking part in ‘Identity Day’ on Friday (21.01.22) with school. Children need to wear their usual Nursery clothes or uniform. Thank you
Winter and welcome!
It was lovely to meet all of our new children and their families on Monday for their ‘stay and play’ session. We’ve enjoyed getting to know everyone this week and children have enjoyed exploring Nursery and playing with some familiar faces as well as beginning to make some new friends.
This week, we have learnt all about the number one. During group time, we passed around a mystery bag that was full of different items that were all linked to the number ‘one’. We looked at the numeral, a ‘one’ piece of Numicon, one counter on a five frame, one pebble, a hand holding up one finger, a unicycle, a dice, a circle, one brick and a few other ‘one’ related items. Can you think of any more? We talked all about the number ‘one’ and also did lots of actions once. We did one clap, one jump and one hop! See if you can spot the number one when you walk to Nursery, maybe on a house door or a number plate. We loved singing ‘One finger, one thumb‘ although it was quite tricky to remember all of the movements towards the end!
We’ve continued to learn about winter this week, talking about the changes in the weather that we noticed when playing outside. Unlike last week, we couldn’t find any ice in the morning and it was very sunny one afternoon – is it still winter? We talked about things that we might see outside in winter time and the clothing that we need to wear. At story time, we looked at a non-fiction book to find out some more information about winter.
In provision, children have enjoyed exploring winter further with some wintery themed enhancements including a ‘Frozen’ small world area and a wintery themed loose parts area.
