Nursery Class News

Nursery places available for September 2018

Posted on Wednesday 09 May 2018 by Nursery Team

We currently have spaces available in nursery for September 2018. If you are looking for a nursery place for your child, or know of anyone who is, please get in touch.

15 hour and 30 hour places are available and we offer a variety of session times including morning sessions and full days. We begin each day at 8.30am and wrap around care is available.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us for more information.

Contact Mrs Beesley or Mrs Long:

  • e-mail: scholesf1@spherefederation.org
  • call the school office: 0113 2649149

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Home Link – Plants and growth

Posted on Monday 07 May 2018 by Nursery Team

We’re going to continue talking about last week’s home link activity as not many of you had chance to be creative! Please scroll down to the ‘Plants and growth’ Home Link post from last week.

We’re also going to learn about the letter ‘n’ sound.  If you find something beginning with the letter n, please bring it in for our sound shelf. Remember to write your child’s name on it.

 

Bikes, bubbles and bunnies!

Posted on Monday 07 May 2018 by Nursery Team

We were really pleased that Peter Rabbit’s friend, George, could visit us on Tuesday afternoon. The children were really well behaved; they asked Gemma lots of questions about how to look after rabbits and they were gentle and calm around George. Photographs to follow!

Children have been fascinated with the tadpoles and have really enjoyed observing them closely with magnifying glasses and finding out about their life cycles in non-fiction books. They’re looking forward to watching them develop into tiny froglets!

On Friday morning, we were really lucky to be able to watch the ladies Tour De Yorkshire race from the playground. We took the flags that we had made and waved them, cheering as the cyclists, flashing police bikes and a helicopter went past. Afterwards, we stayed with the older children in school to watch a skipping performance and we took part in Wake Up Shake Up.

Week 3 – What are we learning this week?

We’re going to continue our learning about growth and life cycles, focussing on plants this week. We will learn:

  • about the life cycle of a bean plant. We will plant our own seeds in bags and cups so that we can closely watch what happens. We’re hoping to see something similar to this video.
  • about the letter sound ‘n’. Listen to the Jolly Phonics ‘n’ song.
  • to operate a remote-controlled toy around Mr McGregor’s garden.
  • to use positional language to describe where Peter Rabbit is hiding. There’s a video on YouTube that might give you more of an idea of the type of language that children need to be able to use. For example, Peter Rabbit is… in, on top of, underneath, behind the table.
  • about bubbles – they seem to be a common interest amongst many children at the moment!

Tour de Yorkshire in Scholes

Posted on Monday 07 May 2018 by Mrs Latham

We enjoyed the excitement of the Tour de Yorkshire coming through Scholes on Friday. Each class decorated a bike to display and the whole school went outside to watch the women’s race speed past.  We did some WuSu (Wake up, Shake up) dances while we were waiting and the Year 4 skipping team showed us their skipping dance from the skipping competition, too. It was a day to remember for sure!

Parent Consultations

Posted on Friday 27 April 2018 by Nursery Team

We hope that you found our Parent Consultation meetings informative this week. It was good to see so many of you and to be able to talk about how much progress children have made so far this year. If you still haven’t had chance to speak to Mrs Long, please speak to staff to arrange an appointment.

Further to these discussions, here are some links that you may find useful regarding the Early Years curriculum.

  • What to expect, When?  This document provides an overview of the Early Years Foundation Stage and what type of things children are expected to be able to do at different stages throughout the year. The booklet has been written to help you as a parent know what to expect during these important years by focusing on the seven areas of learning and development which are covered in the EYFS.
  • Jolly Phonics songs – We sing these songs in nursery and learn a new letter sound each week.  Each song is accompanied by an action.
  • Pure sounds – watch a video clip of our Foundation Two staff saying the pure sound with each Jolly Phonics action.
  • Segmenting and blending – In nursery, we learn to segment and blend words orally.  We teach children to break down (segment) a word into the sounds that they can hear such as ‘p-e-g’   or  ‘c-u-p’ and then to stick/join (blend) these sounds together again to make a word. We do this practically in nursery, playing lots of games. It’s quite difficult to find video clips on line to demonstrate – this is an American version of an oral segmenting and blending game

Please speak to nursery staff if you have any questions.

Home Link – Plants and growth

Posted on Friday 27 April 2018 by Nursery Team

We’ve been busy planting seeds in nursery and talking about what plants need to grow. Children have notcied some changes in our nursery garden; leaves are starting to grow on the trees and we’ve spotted bees visiting spring flowers.

This week, we’d like you to continue learning about plants and growth. You could…

  • Go for a walk around a garden or park. What plants and flowers can you see growing? You could take photos or draw some pictures of things you see.
  • We’re learning the ‘f’ sound this week for ‘frogs’ and ‘flowers’. What other words can you think of that begin with ‘f’?
  • Does your child like gardening? Send us a photo and tell us what they’re growing at home.
  • You could try planting some seeds yourselves. Cress seeds grow quickly!
  • Make a model of a flower (Junk modelling, playdough or construction toys) How could you make the stem, the flower and the leaves?
  • Paint a picture of some flowers. What colours do you need? What are the parts of a flower called?

Peter Rabbit and friends

Posted on Friday 27 April 2018 by Nursery Team

Following on from children’s interest in the latest Peter Rabbit movie, we introduced some rabbit enhancements to nursery this week. We enjoyed listening to some of the original Peter Rabbit stories written by Beatrix Potter and in the art area, we created our own rabbit paintings. In maths, we counted out carrots for Peter and Benjamin Bunny. We focussed on language that we can use to compare groups of objects. Lots of children were confident at using more/ mostwhen comparing groups of objects, but many children found less/ least/ fewer trickier. Please help at home by using these words in everyday situations. Thank-you for sending in lots of ‘r’ objects for our sound shelf; we enjoyed playing “eye-spy something beginning with r,” in group times.  Due to illness, we’ve had to postpone our visit from George the rabbit. We hope to find out the answers to our questions next week. 

Week 3 – What are we learning this week?

We were really pleased to be able to get some frogspawn last week and as we hoped, children were really intrigued to find out about the ‘fish’ swimming in the tank.

This week we will learn:

  • about the life cycle of a frog
  • to make frogspawn prints using bubble wrap – investigating printing with different textures
  • about the letter sound ‘f’ for frog. (Listen to the Jolly Phonics f song here)
  • to count out a set number of tadpoles and remember to stop when we’ve reached that number. (Eg. Can you get 5 tadpoles from the pond? Remember to stop when you reach 5!)
  • Sing ‘5 Little Speckled Frogs’ using the frogs in our water tray.

Slippery slime and tiny tadpoles

Posted on Tuesday 24 April 2018 by Nursery Team

We’ve had a great start to the week. On Monday morning, children helped Miss Backhouse to follow some instructions for how to make slime. They helped to measure out a cup of glue, a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, a tablespoon of a special ingredient and a splash of colour and they mixed them all together in a bowl. The result was a bowl full of colourful slime! It provided lots of opportunities to talk about its texture and properties. Some children realised that they could stretch it and stretch it and stretch it… We talked about the length of their ‘slime worms’ and compared them to find out which was the longest and shortest worm.

If you’d like to make some at home, follow the recipe that we used.

On Tuesday morning, some children noticed that there was a new tank on display in the Quiet room. After closer investigation, they could see that it contained a jelly-like substance and some tiny ‘fish’.  We talked about what was in the tank and used some non-fiction books to find out more information.  Children were very excited to discover that they’re not tiny fish, but tadpoles!  We’re looking forward to learning all about the life cycle of a frog and watching the tadpoles grow and change over the next few weeks.

Home Link – ‘r’ sound

Posted on Sunday 22 April 2018 by Nursery Team

This week we are going to be learning about the ‘r’ sound

Here is a link to the Jolly Phonics song that we will be singing to in Nursery. We sometimes watch Geraldine Giraffe video clips, too. Geraldine likes to find things in the house that begin with the letter…

Can you find things in your home and environment that begin with ‘r’?

If you have something that begins with ‘r’, that you’re happy to send in, please put your child’s name on it and bring it to nursery for our sound shelf.  Alternatively, you could draw a picture or take a photograph of it.

Mischievous Bunnies

Posted on Sunday 22 April 2018 by Nursery Team

Week 1 – welcome back!

It was great to see so many happy faces returning to nursery after the Easter holidays. We hope you had lots of fun; we heard all about Easter egg hunts, visits to the cinema and trips to the seaside and farms. Unfortunately, as Mrs Long wasn’t very well before the holidays, some Parent Consultation Meetings had to be cancelled. Please sign up for a new one this week, if you haven’t already. Appointments before and after nursery are available on Monday, Tuesday and Friday. Please speak to Mrs Long if you’re unable to find a suitable time. It’s a good opportunity for us to discuss with you how your child is progressing in nursery and for you to look through their Learning Journey. For those children moving to Foundation Two in September, we’ll share with you some of the targets that well work towards for the rest of the year.

Here are a few photographs of our Easter fun in nursery before the holidays. Children enjoyed tasting hot cross buns, making Easter nests and cards, going on an Easter egg hunt in our garden. The highlight of the term was definitely seeing the chicks hatching and holding them!

This week, we’ve enjoyed talking to children about the holidays and finding out what their new fascinations are. Thank you for all of your emails with photographs and details of your holidays. Remember, our email is scholesf1@spherefederation.org if you haven’t had chance to send us any yet. We also like to hear about your child’s Wow! moments, too; these could be small or large achievements at home such as fastening a zip by themselves, learning to ride a bike or recognising a letter/number in the environment. Basically, anything that you may suddenly think…Wow! I didn’t know they could do that!

We loved seeing the sunshine this week! Outside was a hive of activity; children were busy making campfires to toast marshmallows (after a few children had a trip to This Green Moon’s Easter event) and using puppets to re-create the Mimika ‘Landscapes’ theatre show that some children were lucky enough to watch this week. There was also a lot of excitement around a certain film involving a rather mischievous bunny…

   

 

Week 2 – What are we learning this week?

As part of our continuing theme of ‘Spring’, we’ll learn about Peter Rabbit and his friends. Children are already busy learning how to look after animals in our new vet role play area and we’re finding out how plants grow so that we can have a vegetable patch just like Mr McGregor. We’ll read some of the traditional stories written by the famous author, Beatrix Potter and we may even have a visit from a furry, four-legged friend. Please let us know if you do not wish your child to take part in handling/stroking the rabbit.