Rain, rain, rain!
Please remember to send your child with a waterproof coat and some wellies this week.
Thank you
Home Link Activity
By now, we’re sure that you’ll have seen our ‘What makes us tick’ display in the entrance. This display shows all of our Nursery children and which key person group they are part of.
We also use this display to find out more about your child’s interests at home and then we use this information to plan activities for children throughout the week. It’s a brilliant way to keep learning fun and relevant for everyone. Children learn best when they are engaged.
Please fill out a post-it note when you next visit Nursery to tell us something that your child loves at the moment.
Interests will be varied; some will be specific to individuals but we often find that many children have shared fascinations too. We’ve seen all sorts on the board before, from spinning objects, dancing and farming to drawing treasure maps and reading a favourite story.
We’re looking forward to finding out about what makes your child tick at home at the moment!
Please up-date this board whenever you notice something new.
Rolling, printing and patterns
The very wet weather hasn’t stopped us having fun learning outside this week. Children are still making the most of our apple tree and have loved collecting the apples and making ramps to roll them down. They found arranging the guttering quite tricky and it sparked lots of conversation about where to put the pipes. We used lots of different words to describe the positions. Higher/lower? Up/down? Did the guttering need to be flat or sloping down?
Now that the weather is on the turn, children need to bring a waterproof coat to Nursery everyday. It’s also a great time to help your child become more independent when putting on their own shoes and coat. Try to pick times when you’re not in a rush to leave the house and encourage your child to have a go. At Nursery, we often start children off by teaching them to put the hood on first. This makes it easier for them to reach their arms into the sleeves. Give it a try!
They’ll be really proud of themselves when they can get ready to play outside at Nursery independently. Zips and buttons can be tricky for little fingers so may require a bit more help.
We’ve also enjoyed investigating different ways of painting using rollers, stamps and brushes.
In our maths area, we continued to sort objects by colours. Children enjoyed copying repeating colour patterns and counting how many people they could link together.
Animals and apples!
We’re really lucky to have several fruit trees in our Nursery garden and at this time of year, some of our favourite activities involve apples. Children love to collect them outside and transport them in wheel barrows. We also love to bake with them. This week, some of our older children enjoyed baking mini apple pies. One group carefully helped to chop the apples whilst the other group made the pastry. They smelt delicious and tasted pretty good too!
The jungle small world area has been very popular and some children extended their play, building the animals homes using the building blocks. This required great concentration and involved lots of testing and adjusting to make sure that the bricks weren’t going to fall down. When they did take a tumble, there were lots of helpers to build them back up again. Great team work, Nursery!
Children are still busy exploring Nursery and the newest children are enjoying returning to their favourite areas each session. As they become more familiar with the different areas of provision, you will start to see us enhancing them slightly to reflect their current interests. One area that we have chosen to adapt for next week is the small world area. Now that children know where to access the jungle animals independently, they have been returned to the basket on the shelf and instead of a jungle, we now have a bear cave!
We loved listening to ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’ last week and children especially enjoyed re-telling the story outside as we moved through the long, wavy grass and tip toed through the forest (in our garden, of course!). To reflect this common interest and favourite book, we have adapted our provision to capture children’s imaginations and to encourage them to re-tell the story themselves.
If you want to join in at home, please enjoy reading the book together if you have a copy. If not, you could visit the library or watch this short video of Michael Rosen telling the story. It’s fantastic! We especially love his sound effects. Listening to sounds and making different voice sounds is one of the first ways that we begin to teach phonics in Nursery. We’ll add more about how we teach Phase One phonics over the next few months in our web site posts.
Finally, you may have noticed bright yellow post-it notes starting to appear under children’s photographs on our ‘What makes us tick?’ board in the entrance to Nursery. Please jot down any interests that your child currently has or favourite games, songs or stories. We use these ideas to help us plan activities that are exciting and relevant for your child. Thank you.
Parking
Please be considerate when you are parking to drop off or pick up children from Nursery. We have received complaints from local residents that cars are being parked on the yellow zig zags and across driveways.
The road markings are there for the safety of our children and adults. Please obey them.
We know that it can be busy at times; if you are able to walk to Nursery or set off slightly earlier to enable you to park further away, please consider doing this to ease the congestion.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Welcome back
It was lovely to welcome all of our returning children back to Nursery on Monday. They had definitely grown over the summer and couldn’t wait to see their friends again and tell us about their holiday adventures. Children were also pleased to meet our new starters; many new friendships are already beginning to form.
Our Stay and Play on Monday afternoon was very busy. Children enjoyed exploring Nursery with their parents and carers and there were lots of sad faces when it was time to go home! Luckily, children didn’t have to wait too long until they returned for their first session.
Well done to everyone (parents and carers included!) for surviving their first session at nursery! It’s a big step for everyone. Many children waved good bye with big smiles on their faces and couldn’t wait to play. For a few children, saying bye was a little tricker; we’re pleased to say that with some support, they all found something that they enjoyed during the session and we’re sure that they’ll soon settle quickly. Keep talking about Nursery in a positive way and they’ll be smiling at the waving window in no time!
We’ll post some photos soon – we just need to check all of our photograph consent forms before we do.
Nursery is ready!
Welcome to our new families and welcome back to our returning ones! We hope that you’ve had a lovely summer break; we can’t wait to see you all and hear all of your exciting stories about your summer adventures.
This week, staff have been very busy preparing Nursery for children to stay and play on Monday. Following the building work during the holidays, we had lots of furniture to move and boxes to unpack. We’re pleased to say that Nursery is ready and looking very inviting – all we need now are some children to come and join Ferdie and Fern to play!
Staff and our Nursery foxes have also been out and about in Scholes and the surrounding villages, visiting our new children in their homes. It was lovely to meet everyone and begin to get to know you all. During these visits, we like to find out a little bit about what your child enjoys and we have incorporated some of the common interests into our Nursery provision. This year’s shared interests ranged from dinosaurs and construction vehicles to jungle/farm animals, baking and dancing. In our reading corners, we have a selection of books that we know are already favourites such as the Gruffalo, The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Peppa Pig.
We’re confident that children will find some thing that they like on Monday…. Here’s a sneaky peak at what they have to enjoy!
We’re looking forward to seeing you all soon.
Returning children will join us on Monday morning from 8.30am until 12.30pm.
New children will join us for their Stay and play session with an adult (approx 1 hour) during the afternoon.
ALDI sticker collection
Aldi have launched a sticker collection scheme that we are hoping to benefit from. Please bring any stickers you collect into school. There is a collection bucket in the entrance. Thank you.
Scholes Open Gardens – scarecrow competition
We have been supporting the team of volunteers who orgainse Scholes in Bloom. Today is the Open Gardens event and we created some scarecrows in school around this year’s theme, ‘World of Song’. The scarecrows will be displayed again on Britain in Bloom judging day on 19 July.
Ladybirds
We’ve learnt all about the life cycle of ladybirds this week and were lucky enough to see every stage of the cycle in Nursery. We found some little eggs on the leaves outside and caught some ladybird larvae which, after eating lots of aphids, formed pupae in our butterfly house. On Friday morning, we saw our first little ladybird! We released it back into our garden where we found the eggs and larvae.
In group times, we learnt about the letter ‘l’ and we carefully drew the correct number of spots on ladybirds. Two of the most popular activities this week were in our creative area; children loved making ladybird shapes out of salt dough and painting spotty ladybird masks. There was some great team work whilst playing a ladybird game on the interactive whiteboard too. Children worked together and took turns to count spots and order the ladybirds.
We also found a very large, hairy spider. Look at its hairy legs! We used our Exploroscope to view it closely and count how many eyes it had.
