It’s Our First Christmas Play
Well done, Nursery! We were very proud of all of our children this week during our performances of ‘It’s Our First Christmas Play’. It’s not easy to stand in the bright lights on a stage in front of so many adults, especially when you are just 3 or 4! We thought the children did brilliantly; they joined in with singing and dancing and were well behaved throughout. We hope you thought so too! Thank you for all of your positive comments regarding the performance and for your support with their super costumes.
Home Link – Christmas story
A few children brought in their favourite Christmas stories last week and we enjoyed sharing them during story time. We enjoyed looking at all of the miniature letters and cards that were inside the ‘Jolly Christmas Postman’ and the children loved peeking through the postbox at the end of the story. ‘Stickman’ was also very popular at story time too; many children could join in with the repeated parts of the story.
We haven’t had chance to read of all your books yet though so we’re going to continue this Home Link for the week beginning Monday 9 December. If you haven’t had chance yet, please bring in your child’s favourite Christmas story (or any favourite story if you don’t have a Christmas one) this week. Thank you
Golden Star
Well done to our most recent Golden Star.
An alternative story
The children have enjoyed re-telling the story ‘We’re going on a bear hunt.’ We have drawn story maps to help us re-tell the story. We have also thought of our own story actions to sequence the story.
Then, we decided to be authors ourselves and change the story. The children decided to change what we were going on a hunt for. We then thought of alternative words for the word big – to make our story more exciting. Here are some examples of the children’s alternative stories.
“We’re going on a dinosaur hunt. We’re going to catch a ginormous one!”
“We’re going on a snake hunt. We’re going to catch a slithering, long one!”
“We’re going on a monster hunt. We’re going to catch a humungous one!”
The children then drew their own alternative story and used the story actions to retell their stories to their friends.
Challenge – 3 bricks
Can your child re-tell their alternative story? Can they use the actions to help them or draw a story map? Please email photos or videos.
School Council tree planting – thanks to Scholes in Bloom
We have planted another 120 trees from the Woodland Trust on the school grounds this week. Thank you to Scholes in Bloom and the School Council for helping to do this.
You can also see the Scholes in Bloom presentation here that children in school saw last week too. The village looks wonderful!
Planting Trees
Our School Councillors were busy at work this afternoon, digging holes and planting young trees in and around our school field. There were roses, hawthorns, dogwoods, wild cherries and silver birches.
There were 120 saplings to plant and, with the help of Scholes in Bloom volunteers, 
….they manged to do it all in one (cold and windy) afternoon!
Thank you very much to our fabulous friends, Scholes in Bloom, who kindly gave up their time to help us – we couldn’t have done it without you!
Thank you to Mrs Latham who ordered the trees and organised the afternoon. We promise to look after them and will enjoy watching them grow.
Hansel and Gretel show
The children who won the free tickets to see Hansel and Gretel had a lovely time today. Watching a live performance is so special and memorable. Luckily, all the children had the opportunity to enjoy Sleeping Beauty last week too!
Yorkshire Cricket
We had another visit from Tom Bates from Yorkshire Cricket this week. He worked with teachers last week, sharing coaching tips for us to use in lessons. He shared an assembly with us this week, talking to the children about cricket, upcoming coaching and competitions we will be entering.
Christmas has arrived in Nursery!
December has arrived and children came to Nursery on Monday morning full of excitement and with tales of decorating Christmas trees and visits to see Santa.
We’re sure you’ll have already noticed the Christmas themed enhancements in Nursery this week. Here are a few of the areas that we have adapted to promote learning though different areas of play.
In our Maths area, we have a selection of baubles, bells and pom poms. Children can use tweezers to pick up the objects and sort them onto the Christmas tree shapes. This is an open ended activity to promote counting and sorting. It also doubles up as a fiddly finger challenge too, helping to strengthen children’s hand muscles as they squeeze the tweezers. We have a similar activity in our water tray, but on a larger scale. Children are enjoying catching the floating baubles using larger tongs and both hands.
In our small world areas, children have been learning about the Nativity story and delivering presents in Santa’s sleigh. Children have even started to tell their own stories involving Santa’s sleigh getting stuck in the snow!
Many children have been talking about writing a letter to Santa. In our mark making area, we have been practising our scissor skills by cutting out toys that we would like. There are some very long lists! Some children wrote their name next to their chosen toy and others practised writing the first letter of their name.
In our new North Pole role play area, children, or should we say elves, were very busy wrapping presents ready to put in Santa’s sack. We’ve seen some great team work as children used the bricks to make a sleigh for Santa. We counted how many elves there were and worked out how many seats the sleigh would need to have.
Science with sweets!
Our science lessons this week involved children peforming a simple test.
What effect will water have on Skittles?
The children had lots of ideas about what might happen and why.
It might go soggy.
The colour might come off.
The shell will disintegrate.
The shell will vapourise.
The colour will make a pattern in the water.
The water will be coloured.
The colour will come off.
There were gasps as we watched what happened. Why not have a go at home?