Tadpoles and frogs
This week, we enjoyed learning a little bit more about our wriggly guests in Nursery. We looked at the tadpoles carefully and drew them using fine liners; they were too quick to look at with our Exploroscope!
Children loved singing ‘Five Little Speckled Frogs’. Here’s a link to a video in case you don’t know the song so that you can sing a long at home!
In the sensory area, we had ‘tapioca’ frogspawn and tadpoles. It was great fun to scoop it up and look at all of the little jelly balls. It looked like tiny tadpole eggs which we learnt is called frogspawn. We enjoyed finding out about the life cycle of a frog and children can’t wait for the legs to begin to grow.
It was a very wet week but that didn’t stop us from taking our learning outside. We made potions and explored colour mixing in the rain. As we were making our potions, we noticed that we could smell something. After a little bit of investigating, we realised that it was the herbs that we could smell. We talked about fresh basil on pizzas and the smell of mint reminded us of brushing our teeth.
Some children noticed that the water in the tray changed colour when they added some paint. This led to lots of conversations regarding colour mixing and how to make the blue water change to purple or green.
The Evil Pea strikes!
Oh, what fun we’ve had in Nursery this week! Continuing with our love of the Supertato stories, this week, the Evil Pea visited Nursery and has been up to mischief.
On Tuesday, he kidnapped all of the carrots from our snack bowl and hid them outside. Children were very excited trying to spot them all from the window and couldn’t wait to get outside to find them and set them free. Children worked together to figure out how to get them down from all of the different places, high and low.
Once the carrots had been set free, we used a giant tens frame to count how many we had found and marked on our carrot clipboards.
The children were very excited and couldn’t wait to see what the Evil Pea would get up to next!
On Wednesday, he had visited Nursery and left us a letter.
The Evil Pea had captured all of the vegetables from our fridge and locked them up outside. Luckily for us, he must have dropped his map on the way out and so we had a clue to follow.
We drew on the locations of the keys that we could see in our garden and went outside to hunt for the missing keys.
Children quickly found the keys and began to try and unlock the mini padlocks. However, the keys didn’t fit! With a bit of team work, they figured out that the coloured bands on the padlocks must match the colours on the keys. Phew! The locks opened and the veggies were free.
Our visit from The Evil Pea caused lots of excitement in Nursery and stimulated some fantastic conversations as a result of his mischievous deeds.
Children demonstrated lots of the ‘characteristics of effective learning’ during these activities; they were… motivated, curious, exploring, engaging, pretending, solving problems, deciding, negotiating, thinking, focussing, persisting, concentrating and proud of their achievements.
Outside, we practised aiming and throwing by trying to knock Evil Pea and his friends off their spots and squirting them with water! These activities are a great way to develop both gross and fine motor skills from the Physical Development part of the Early Years curriculum. Squirting water definitely helped to strengthen finger muscles!
Get active with orienteering – FREE EVENT
Your local orienteering club, AIRIENTEERS, are hosting a FREE orienteering event especially for juniors, families and anyone new to the sport.
PLACE : Millennium Field, off Barleyfields Ct, Wetherby, LS22 6FZ
DATE : Saturday 11th May 1:30-2:30
There will be courses with electronic timing for all ages.
See www.aire.org.uk for more information about the races.
Start any time from 1:30 to 2:30. Just turn up and run.
Supertato to the rescue!
Children are thoroughly enjoying the Super Veggie themed enhancements to Nursery. They loved creating their own vegetable superheroes; thank you to everyone who supported us and provided their child with a vegetable for the home link activity.
In maths, we’ve been learning about heavier and lighter using the balance scales. Lots of children knew the word ‘heavy’ but many needed support to understand ‘light/lightest’. You could continue this learning at home by asking questions during everyday activities. Which bag from the supermarket is lightest? Which toy is lighter?
Outside, some children showed real perseverance when building a frame for a den. They had to work out where to put each connecting part and cooperate with each other, to help hold the poles in place until the cube was stable. Great team work, Nursery!
The tadpoles and arrival of our eggs have also created lots of excitement; we’ll continue to learn about their life cycles over the next few weeks as we watch them grow and develop and wait for the eggs to hatch!
Super Veggies!
Once the Easter excitement has faded, we’re going to enjoy reading about the adventures of ‘Supertato’ and his vegetable friends. Many children have shown an interest in this book and its superhero characters. We’ll also continue with our ‘growing’ theme and learning about different life cycles. As well as our new Nursery children, we will also welcome some other visitors to Nursery. Some are small, wriggly and live in a tank and some are very fragile and will spend the next 21 days in our incubator… You’ll have to ask your child to tell you more!
For this week’s home link activity, can you visit the supermarket or raid your fridge to find some weird and wonderful veggies to send into Nursery? We’re going to transform them into superheroes – watch this space for some photos next week.
Easter fun
It was lovely to see everyone’s smiling faces on their return to Nursery this week. We enjoyed hearing about all of your fun adventures over the holidays; from camping trips with inflatable sofas, sledging in the mountains, meeting Princesses and building sandcastles in Wales!
This week, our learning was themed around Easter. We enjoyed sampling hot cross buns at snack time and talked about the Easter story and some of the ways that Christians celebrate Easter.
One of the most popular activities this week was decorating and rolling eggs. After rolling our eggs, we noticed that the shells had begun to crack. We enjoyed cracking them open and carefully removing the shell. Many children were amazed at what they found inside! They loved peeling away the egg white to reveal the yellow yolk.
Outside, we enjoyed taking part in egg hunts. Children took turns to hide the eggs for each other and pretended to be the Easter bunny. We counted the eggs back into the basket each time and somebody realised that the golden egg had gone missing! We looked all over for it, but couldn’t find it anywhere. We drew a map of the Nursery garden to make sure that we searched everywhere. A few children thought that Jack had stolen it, just like he stole the golden egg from the giant. Mrs Brown called Jack’s mum on the phone but he was out – probably climbing beanstalks! Eventually, we decided to make a giant, golden egg; we certainly wouldn’t loose that one!
When the missing egg was found (it was hiding in a welly!), some children decided to make a special nest to help keep it safe.
At the maths table, we counted eggs and compared their sizes, colours and patterns. We also had some stacking chicks; it was quite tricky to find the matching top and bottom parts. In our Fiddly Fingers area, we used a timer to race against the clock to see how many eggs we could pick out of the nest in 3 minutes. Using the tweezers was difficult, but it was great to see children persevering until they mastered it.
Welcome back!
We hope that you’ve had a great holiday and are looking forward to returning to Nursery.
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be learning about Spring time. It would be beneficial for your child if you could consolidate this learning at home too.
There are lots of things you could do:
- Talk about any signs of spring that you can see when you go for a walk to the park or visit a farm. Can you hear the birds singing?
- E-mail us some photographs of flowers, buds on trees or baby animals that you see.
- Draw/paint a picture or create a collage of some spring flowers.
- Learn the names of some farm animals and their babies (eg sheep/lamb)
As always, we’d love to hear about your holiday adventures. Please e-mail or bring in a leaflet to show us where you have visited during the holidays.
scholesf1@spherefederation.org
RSPB visit
This afternoon, we had a special visitor from the RSPB. We listened to a story all about a baby hedgehog. Everything in the hedgehog’s nest and little world was brown. The walls were brown, the floor was brown, Mummy hedgehog was brown – brown was everywhere! One dark night, Mummy hedgehog decided it was time to leave the nest. A whole host of sights, smells, sounds, tastes and textures awaited the little hedgehog. He enjoyed crunching a beetle in the garden; it tasted yummy. He saw colourful flowers and felt the prickles of a bramble bush on his nose. Ouch!
We talked about using our senses to explore our environment, just like the baby hedgehog had done on his adventures outside his nest. Next, the children worked in groups to explore the Nursery garden using all of their senses. They listened to the special call that robins use to ‘talk’ to each other and looked for different coloured flowers and plants. We enjoyed finding ‘smelly’ plants to make a special hedgehog soup.
What a great afternoon of learning in the sunshine! We’d like to thank the RSPB for joining us and running this session; we had a great time.
Monsters in the mud and rainbows
The changeable weather provoked lots of questions this week; children wondered how rainbows were formed and also talked about the different shapes of clouds. We enjoyed listening to songs about rainbows and collecting the colours we needed to create a giant rainbow collage. Children were very excited when they went outside on Tuesday – somebody had visited the playground whilst we’d been hiding from the wind inside! There were lots of suggestions as to who the very large footprints belonged to. Trolls? Monsters? Giants?
Did you see the messy monsters in the mud in our sensory area this week? As well as learning about the letter sound ‘mmm’, children also enjoyed moving the monsters through the gloop and investigating the different properties of the mixture. Sometimes it was solid and felt very hard to touch and sometimes it was runny and slipped through our fingers. The ‘mud’ was actually a mixture of cornflour, water and colouring.
If you want to enjoy some gloopy fun at home, just try mixing some cornflour and water together and watch what happens. We’re sure you’ll enjoy it and it’s an excellent way to develop language and introduce new vocabulary to your child. (There is a recipe you could try on the BBC website if you prefer to have exact quantities. We didn’t try the egg part detailed in this experiment!)
On Friday, some children joined in with some ‘Red Nose Day’ fun. Thank you for your fund raising donations.
Sharing stories with Year 6 children for World Book Day
We had great fun dressing up as our favourite book characters on Thursday for World Book Day. Thank you for providing your child with a costume; they looked great!
It was lovely to see some parents staying for our ‘Stay and Read’ session in Nursery too. Thank you for joining us; children love it when you join in.
During the day, we enjoyed reading stories with the older children who came to visit us in Nursery. We talked about all of the characters that children were dressed as and read lots of their favourite books. It was evident that we love Julia Donaldson stories, especially The Gruffalo!
