Christmas celebrations
In between our concerts last week, we still had time to enjoy some Christmas themed learning. One of the most popular activities was helping Father Christmas in his Elves’ Workshop. After wrapping the presents, children built a sleigh and enjoyed delivering them to all of their friends. We’ve also been writing Christmas cards, counting baubles, sorting Christmas shapes and making reindeer in the playdough. We’ll continue with our Christmas activities for the final week.
Children will listen to the Nativity story and find out more about how some people celebrate Christmas. We’ll be watching some of these short clips from the ‘Let’s Celebrate‘ programme on CBeebies.
If you want to play some games on the computer at home, there are lots of links to Christmas games on the Topmarks website. Our favourite games last week, were playing tunes on the reindeer’s noses and putting the correct number of baubles onto the tree. This is a great game to practise counting out the right number of objects from a group and knowing that you need to stop when you’ve reached the required quantity. That’s quite a tricky early maths skill to master!
A Snowman at Sunset
Wow! We hope you enjoyed watching your super snowflakes performing on stage this afternoon. We were really proud of all of the children today. There were a few wobbles and nerves before our performance but we’re sure that you couldn’t tell; children confidently went on stage and sang along to our ‘Snowflakes’ song. It really is quite daunting to stand on a stage in front of eighty or more grown ups, especially when you’re only three or four. Well done, Nursery!
We hope you enjoyed watching the show as much as the children enjoyed peforming it. If you didn’t come today, you’re in for a treat on Wednesday morning.
Book People Book Fair
This week, we’ve a Book People book fair at school. The Book People are an online book shop, selling books at up to 70% off RRP prices. We’ve a great selection of individual books starting from £4 and a wide range of boxed books, too. Tomorrow is the last day we will be selling the books in school. We will open the book fair at 3.15pm for parents to buy and browse before the end of school. The fair is located in the main reception area.
Thank you to everyone who has already paid us a visit and bought a book.
The school earns money for the sales we make, which helps us replenish the school library, guided reading books and books for the children to enjoy in their classrooms.
Stick Man
We’re going to read one of our favourite Julia Donaldson books this week, ‘Stick Man’.
If you have a copy, please enjoy reading it together so that your child gets to know the story well. Mrs Long has just visited the theatre in Manchester to see a stage production of ‘Stick Man’ – it was great! It held the attention of a two year old for 55 minutes. If you can’t get hold of a copy from the library, you could always watch the animated version. (Amazon Prime members can access the full version.)
The story provides lots of learning opportunities to help develop early reading skills. We’ll order events in the story and talk about how Stick Man is feeling at different parts. Is he sad, scared, lonely, happy or excited? There are also lots of points in the story where children can join in with the repeated refrains, “I’m Stick Man. I’m Stick Man…”
Have fun doing the Home link activity this week; we look forward to seeing your own Stick Man creations.
Incy Wincy Spider
On Tuesday, it was very wet and miserable outside. We said lots of rainy day related rhymes, including ‘Doctor Foster’, ‘Rain, rain go away,’ and of course, ‘Incy Wincy Spider’.
Doctor Foster went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain.
He fell in a puddle, right up to his middle
And never went there again.
Whilst singing in the Nursery Rhyme corner, a big spider ran across the carpet. We caught it and looked at it closely before letting it go again. A few minutes later, somebody found another spider in the bottom of a box. Sadly, this spider was dead, but that also meant that we could use our magnifying glasses and Exploroscope to look at its eight legs very closely. (The Exploroscope is a digital microscope that connects to the iPad. It is easy to use and very child friendly.)
Children were fascinated!
“Look at all those spikes,” one child commented when they saw the tiny little hairs on its legs. Once we’d finished looking at the spider, children went on to explore other items including shells, pine cones and their own hands and hair!
“It’s on the iPad and its really, really big!”
“Can I see my finger nail? Closer, closer,”
World Nursery Rhyme Week
We’re looking forward to joining in with World Nursery Rhyme Week. We have lots of fun activities planned around some of our favourite rhymes. Look out for more information in your child’s folder this week.
Here are a few of the popular rhymes that we’ll enjoy learning and singing along to:
Remember to take part in our Home Link activity. Please bring in an item that is linked to your child’s favourite Nursery rhyme. We’re going to create a collection of Nursery rhyme props in the Rainbow Room for children to share with their friends.
If you’d like to find out more about why singing Nursery rhymes are so important for your child’s early literacy skills and language development, there are lots of links on the World Nursery Rhyme Week website and an article here that summarises some of the many benefits.
Run, run as fast as you can…
Children loved listening to The Gingerbread Man story this week and quickly began to join in with the repeated refrains in the story. We re-told the story outside and enjoyed baking our own gingerbread people at the beginning of the week. In maths, we practised lots of important counting skills when putting the buttons on our ginger bread people.
One of the highlights of the week had to be investigating what would happen to the Gingerbread Man if he got wet in the river. The children were fascinated watching as the gingerbread ‘melted’ (we talked about melting and dissolving) in the water.
We will remember them – Remembrance Day 2018
The children listened to poems and stories, then talked about Remembrance Day this week at school. They made poppies and some wrote messages to the soldiers.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Laurence Binyon
Thank you to Mrs Thorne for her artistic input and Peter Smith, from Lyndhurst View, who made the central piece.
Bang! Pop! Whooosh!
There were lots of happy faces in Nursery on Monday morning and lots of excited tales of Halloween parties and firework related fun.
We enjoyed talking about the photographs that some parents and carers sent in from their holidays, but we’d love to see more. They’re a really great starting point for conversations and help to remind children about their activities at home. The ‘Understanding the World’ part of the Early Years Foundation Stage requires children to be able to freely communicate about their home life. Having a stimulus to look at with children, such as a leaflet for somewhere they have visited or a photograph, is a really big help when trying to begin a conversation. Equally, something as simple as you telling us at the beginning of the day or emailing us about something you have done, is a helpful way for us to initiate conversation with your child about their experiences.
Here are a few ideas of things that you can do at home to support your child in the ‘Understanding the World’ and ‘Communication and Language’ areas of the curriculum. They’re taken from a really useful document,‘What to expect, when?’. It breaks down the Early Years Foundation Stage into a more user and parent/ cared friendly version.
As you can imagine, conversations at the beginning of the week were largely about fireworks and Bonfire night parties.
We listened to music with loud firework sounds and talked about the noises they made. We tried to re-create the sounds in our small world area with the moving rocket, whoooosh!
We enjoyed lots of creative activities this week, both inside and outside. Children really enjoyed our large scale firework artwork; they practised some gross motor movements, splattering paint onto a large ‘night sky’. As you can see from the photographs, we try our best to keep messy activities as clean as they can be!
In maths, we’ve been investigating patterns and repeating colour patterns.
We always try to look out for children’s interests to guide our planning and create relevant learning opportunities. This week, children showed an interest in the Gingerbread Man story so we’re looking forward to exploring this story a little bit more next week.
Please read the Weekly Up-date for information regarding our Nursery Parent consultation meetings and lots of exciting Christmas dates. We’ll post them here soon.
Home Link – Half term holiday adventures
Please remember to tell us about your holiday adventures. You could send us some photographs or bring in a leaflet of somewhere you visited during the holidays.
You could tell us about baking, art activities, trips to the park, swimming, visits to farms/ museums or anything else that your child has enjoyed.
Children love to show their photographs on our interactive whiteboard and tell friends about their adventures. It’s a great way to increase confidence and also provides lots of conversation and opportunities to extend vocabulary.
We’ll look forward to seeing your emails in our inbox: scholesf1@spherefederation.org
We hope you’ve had a good holiday and are looking forward to seeing everyone this week.