Is there room on the broom?
There were some unusual footprints on the floor in Nursery on Monday morning!
Following on from the children’s interest in footprints last week, we looked closely at the shapes and sizes of the mysterious visitors’ prints. Children suggested different animals that they might belong to. The dog was the easiest to guess; many children recognised it because it looked like their pet dog’s muddy footprints. The frog, bird and ‘dragon/monster’ prints caused a bit of confusion.
In group time, we read ‘Room on the Broom’ and children joined in with the repeated refrains in the story. They’ve enjoyed using the story props to re-tell the story in the small world area.
Outside, we created a dragon’s cave and then decided that it would be a good idea to make our own dragon. We looked at some pictures of dragons and talked about the different colours and body parts. Next, we worked together to paint our dragon and added different materials to create scales and spikes.
Whilst reading ‘Room on the Broom’, children enjoyed the part of the story where the witch makes a magic potion in her cauldron. We made our own fizzing potions…
Iggity, ziggity, zaggety, ZOOOOOOOM!
If you’d like to try it at home, there’s one way to do it here. We just used bicarbonate of soda, white vinegar and food colouring in Nursery but there are many different versions. Not only is it fun, but it’s a good talking point and provides lots of opportunities to extend children’s vocabulary. We used pipettes in Nursery, which are a good way of helping to strengthen and develop children’s finger muscles.
We’ve made slime and investigated its properties: stretchy, slimy, sticky, runny…
On Monday, it was very windy so we went onto the KS1 playground with ribbon sticks to watch them dance in the wind.
It’s been a busy week so far and there are still two more days to go before half term.
Home Link – Room on the Broom
Our Home link activity this week is to enjoy reading ‘Room on the Broom’ together at home.
If you don’t have a copy, you could visit the library or watch an on-line version of the story here.
There are some fun activities and colouring sheets available to download on Julia Donaldson’s website. We’re going to try and make some mini broomsticks in Nursery this week. You could also print off some of the animal masks and try re-telling the story together at home using them.
Pumpkins
Children have loved exploring the pumpkins this week; we’ve rolled pumpkins, weighed pumpkins, drawn and painted on pumpkins, made pumpkins in the playdough and explored patterns on pumpkins in the maths area. At the end of the week, we especially enjoyed cutting them open to explore their slippery, slimy contents. What a lot of pumpkin-themed learning!
Thank you to everyone who completed our ‘Autumn bag’ Homelink activity. Children enjoyed sharing the contents of their bags with their friends during group time. This is a great way to encourage children to speak in front of their peers and to build their confidence. Children love to talk about things that they have done at home with friends and family and they especially like to show items that they have found.
If you’d like to do something creative at home over half-term, we’re sure that children would love to have a go at making a pumpkin bowl. They’d love tearing up the paper (which is good for developing finger strength) and getting messy joining in with the papier mache part of this art project. Some parts are trickier and would need an adult to help.
There’s a fun CBeebies ‘Peter Rabbit and the Giant Pumpkin’ story available to read on the Storytime app too.
Harvest Festival – a big thank you!
Thank you for all the kind donations to our Harvest Festival today. Henry, from the Salvation Army, was overwhelmed by the generosity of the families at Scholes. Thank you for each and every donation.
Chips, cheesy pizzas and caterpillars
We’ve followed a number of different interests in Nursery so far this week, from chips to caterpillars!
On Monday morning, whilst having ‘tea’ in the home corner, we were eating chips and talking about where they came from. Many children suggested the supermarket and Chinese take-away, but nobody knew which vegetable they were made from. We read a story called ‘Oliver’s Vegetables’. In the story, Oliver loves chips and they’re all he wants to eat. When he visits his Grandad, Oliver is only allowed to have chips for his tea when he can find the correct plant growing in his Grandad’s allotment. After a quick trip to the shops for some potatoes, children enjoyed making chips in the afternoon. They cleaned the potatoes and were very careful when cutting them into chip shapes. Their favourite part had to be eating them!
We also found a very unusual caterpillar in Nursery on Monday. It had green and black stripes and was very hairy. It even had a big, red spike on its back. Children were really excited about it and enjoyed using the magnifying glasses to look at it closely. They drew some great observational drawings and tried hard to copy the stripes and prickles. We tried to find out more about what type of caterpillar it was; we used a nature book and searched on Google until we found an answer. It was a Pale Tussock caterpillar which will eventually become a moth.
Look what I’ve found. It’s very prickly!
After lots of pizza shop role play, children became real pizza chefs on Tuesday and made their own pizzas. They spread the tomato paste onto the pitta breads, sprinkled the cheese on top and added a few basil leaves. This provided lots of opportunities for discussion, as we watched what happened to the cheese as it melted.
Nursery rhymes
So far this week, we have enjoyed singing lots of Nursery rhymes and favourite children’s songs. They seem to keep popping up everywhere in our play! Singing Nursery rhymes is a very important part of daily life in Nursery. There is a wealth of evidence to suggest that young children who regularly sing nursery rhymes, will go on to develop a love of literacy and language and will become confident readers.
- In our water area, children have loved making and pouring cups of tea. We wonder if you can guess which nursery rhyme we sang as we poured?
- We’ve made boats in our construction area and enjoyed singing ‘Row, row, row your boat’. Our favourite verse is when the crocodile appears in the stream, Arghhhhhh! Follow this link and you can enjoy singing along at home too.
- In the Quiet room, a group of children noticed a very large spider hiding behind the whiteboard. We counted the legs and talked about where spiders liked to live. Lots of children enjoyed singing Incy Wincy Spider!
Crazy about conkers!
As you will have probably noticed, we have a lot of conkers in Nursery at the moment and children are still enjoying finding more! It’s amazing just how many learning opportunities they have provided:
- counting
- weighing
- comparing sizes and ordering
- making patterns
- using tongs to pick them up (This is a great way to help children develop and strengthen the muscles of the hands and fingers.)
- observational drawing (Make sure you have a look at some of the artwork on display in the Rainbow room)
- conker rolling paintings
- discussions about texture
- conversations about the changes in seasons
- hide and seek games with friends outside
There are lots of Autumn activities you could do at home:
- The Woodland Trust has a selection of Nature Detectives activity sheets that you can download and print. Here is a link to the Autumn leaf Nature Detective sheet – you could go on a leaf hunt and see which leaves you can find. Talk about the different shapes, colours and sizes and don’t forget to tell us about your adventures at home.
- There are lots and lots of Autumn activities on the Imagination Tree’s website. We particularly like the creative ideas involving painting with different sticks and leaves and conker rolling in paint. It’s great to explore different ways of making marks and patterns.
- There are a few links to Autumn themed games and activities on the CBeebies website. We like to count leaves in our Nursery garden and enjoy having a go at ‘squigling’ using zig-zag and wavy lines.
Autumn treasure
Autumn has definitely arrived. Lots of children have been out exploring this weekend are were keen to show us the Autumn treasure that they had collected. This generated a lot of discussion about the windy weather and conkers falling off trees.
We looked at some conkers that children had brought into Nursery and talked about the different shapes and sizes. Some of the conkers that Mrs Long had found were still in their cases. We looked closely at the shells and felt their prickles carefully. Children were excited to see a crack down one of the shells; we carefully opened it and found not just one, but two shiny conkers inside!
The Autumn woodland small world area was popular today and the tractors were very busy collecting hay bales in the fields. Some children tried to stack the hay bales in the trailer. It was quite tricky and took a lot of perseverance to stack them in a tall tower. It was even harder to stop them from falling off as the tractor moved across the bumpy field to the farm!
The Sunshine room was buzzing with excitement this morning. Children loved ordering and making pizzas in our new role play area. They played together, taking turns to take orders and to make and cook the pizzas. Some pizzas cost “5 dollars” and some were “2 pounds”. Children counted out the coins carefully as they paid.
Making friends and exploring Nursery
We’ve had a great start to the week in Nursery; most children have now had their first session and we’ve been really proud of how well they’ve all settled in. Children are beginning to make friends and it’s been lovely to see them playing alongside each other and starting to become involved in role play together. The home corner has been a hive of activity with children enjoying making cups of tea and some breakfast for Mrs Long.
In our Nursery garden, we’ve been collecting lots of apples from the trees. Miss Backhouse, and a group of little helpers, used them to bake some delicious apple buns. The children helped to count out the apples, weigh the ingredients and mix them together. We enjoyed eating the apples and buns at snack time. Yum yum!
In the Early Years Foundation Stage, physical development is one of the important Prime Areas. Children should be able to move freely with pleasure and confidence in a range of different ways such as slithering, shuffling, rolling, crawling, walking, running, jumping, skipping, sliding
and hopping.
As you can see, we’ve been busy developing our climbing and balancing skills already this week.
Welcome to Nursery
We had a busy time visiting all of our new children and their families at home last week. It was great to meet everybody and to begin to get to know each other. Ferdie, our Nursery fox, enjoyed making lots of new friends and is looking forward to seeing everybody again when they visit Nursery this week.
It was lovely to see our older Nursery children again on Monday and Tuesday; we think they’ve grown over the holidays! We’ve enjoyed finding out about their holiday adventures to farms and beaches (and even a trip to a hospital!)
All of the children noticed lots of changes in Nursery. They spotted our super, shiny new toilets and sinks straight away. They also enjoyed exploring the Rainbow room and finding out what new toys there were in each area.
As well as seeing our old friends again, we have also begun to make new friends in Nursery during the ‘Stay and play’ sessions this week. We’ll post some photographs soon.