Happy half term!
What a super half term we’ve had at nursery!
We can’t believe it’s the end of our first half term together. We’re amazed by how well the children have settled and really begun to forge some lovely friendships with old and new faces. A big thank you to everyone who has contributed to the ‘interests’ board. ‘Paw Patrol’ has been mentioned several times by the children and parents alike. So much so, that we decided to turn our large construction area into a Paw Patrol look out tower! This has provided fantastic opportunities for the children to develop their communication, imagination and number skills-all whilst ‘just playing’ of course! Outdoors, several children really enjoyed creating ramps and slopes for different vehicles to use. We made predictions about which cars would travel the furthest, tested our guesses and then made marks using chalks to compare the results. Lots of super language: “The green truck will go the furthest, look it’s going down the very steep ramp.”
We enjoyed learning about Diwali, too; we listened to the story of Rama and Sita and found out about the Festival of Lights is celebrated. Some of our children told us all about the fireworks they were going to see on Thursday evening.
It’s nearly good bye… Miss Logan has worked closely with Mr Gledhill over the last few weeks to ensure a smooth transition for the children in green group. Miss Logan will be returning to school to work her remaining four weeks in Year 1 (so she can sit down a little bit more!) However, we’re lucky to have her back for her final day in nursery on Tuesday 31 October to say a final goodbye!
What are we learning after the holidays?
We’ll have a Halloween theme throughout nursery upon our return with a focus on pumpkins as we enjoy the story ‘Pumpkin soup’ in key worker time. We shall be getting messy in the sensory area, squishing and squashing the flesh and looking closely at the insides. Best of all, we’ll be making a delicious and healthy pumpkin soup! There will be lots of opportunities to develop our creative sides as we make glittery playdough spiders and explore capacity in the ‘magic water’ with different sized bottles and containers. Outdoors, the mud kitchen will be a real hive of activity as we explore what happens when we use vinegar and bicarbonate of soda in our spells! We hope someone remembers to write the magic potions down on the notepads so we can talk about them afterwards (and develop our mark making skills!)
Have a super half term holiday!
Conkers and School Council
We’ve had another learning-loaded week to finish the first half term of the school year. Our English work has involved lots of noun-spotting and securing sentence construction. You could help consolidate this learning at home by looking out for, and talking about, nouns and how they appear in our language.
We also collected a whopping 1,343 conkers. We’ve used them to help us count in 10s. You could join in at home and collect interesting objects to count in 2s, 5s or 10s. Now we’ve finished with them, we’ve returned them to the woods behind school for the squirrels to enjoy – and hopefully a few will grow into chestnut trees, too!
The excitement was palpable during the voting for the school council representatives. We used a voting booth, ballot papers and a ballot box to make it an authentic experience. Well done to those that got voted in.
The class assembly from 2KL was amazing. The children were so excited and proud to share all their learning. Thank you to all the parents and carers who came to support the children.
Diwali
Today, we have learnt about Diwali. We read the story of Rama and Sita and talked about ‘the festival of light’. The children have enjoyed colouring and painting Rangoli and Mehndi patterns.
We talked about how Diwali is celebrated and how it is similar to how we celebrate our birthday and Christmas.
Fun with phonics!
This week, we’re focusing on the sounds that we have learnt so far: s, a, t, p, i and n. We’ll be singing the Jolly Phonic songs and listening for words that begin with these sounds. We’ll also be looking at how to form the letters.
Ask your child what sounds the objects in the picture below begin with. Let us know what your child said using a WOW sheet.
Children’s interests
We plan around your child’s interests. Here is our interest board where we write any interests that we could use in the classroom.
For example, some children are interested in Power Rangers and this week we’ll be trying to free the Power Rangers that are caught in elastic bands.
Please write on the bubble if your child has any interests that we could use to plan for an exciting classroom environment. We’ll also be encouraging children to add to this board, too – please feel free to add to it any time!
Has your child been learning their words on their word rocket? To make it more fun you could play ‘Splat’. Using a fly splatter, hit the word as you say it. The children have really enjoyed playing this at school!
Harvest: 13 October 2017
Thank you for the generous donations. The Salvation Army collected the tins and packets for their food bank.
Highlights this week
We enjoyed learning about mindfulness this week and learnt new breathing techniques to help us approach difficult situations in a calm manner.
We’ve been working on our rapid recall of number facts, using dominoes to help. Please practise these at home, too.
Well done to our Golden Star this week. I think she feels proud!
Home Link – Shapes
Can you make a picture using different shapes?
You could make a house, vehicle, pattern… Be as creative as you like!
Remember to talk about the names of the shapes you use.
For this week’s activity, please write any vocabulary your child uses as they make their picture. For example: ‘It’s a circle, like a wheel’ or ‘The house has a triangle for a roof’. This important feedback from home link activities helps to inform our assessments and plan the next steps in the children’s learning.
You could always email us a photograph and any comments to our Foundation One email: scholesf1@spherefederation.org
Whoosh!
We had great fun making delicious currant buns, carefully weighing the ingredients and stirring the mixture together. The smell was amazing! They were, of course, decorated with a cherry on the top! The children really enjoyed extending their play into the ‘playdough’ baker’s shop and even into the maths area where they used the balance scales to weigh different ingredients. Last Wednesday, we had a wonderful ‘wellie walk’ around the school field. We collected a huge bag of leaves, sticks and feathers which we enjoyed sorting by shape, size and colour. Some children were sure we would find fairies in the big tree trunks! No luck this time but maybe we need to think about how to attract them into the nursery area… watch this space!
What are we learning this week?
We’ll be extending our play and learning about 2D shapes by going on a shape hunt and using shapes in our creative areas. The children have absolutely loved using props as they sang the currant buns song; this week we shall be using the rhyme ‘5 little speckled frogs’ to develop number and language skills.
The frog theme also links in nicely as we begin to prepare for all things magical at the end of October. Watch out for magic potions, spiders and spells in the water area!
We shall be reading ‘Room on a broom’ by Julia Donaldson in our key person groups. We will use the story as a stimulus for small world play using props to retell the story. There are some fun activities available to download on the Room on the Broom website, including a memory game for you to play. You could also watch the story on line if you don’t have a copy at home.
Autumn walk
Nursery children enjoyed listening to the ‘We’re going on a leaf hunt‘ story before we went on our own hunt around the school grounds. We thought about the things that we might find and took a big bag with us.
It was very muddy so we wore our wellies to walk through the squishy mud. Squelch, squerch, squelch, squerch! We found colourful autumn leaves of all different shapes and sizes, twisted ivy around tree trunks and we spotted a squirrel gathering some acorns. We even found some mushrooms that we knew not to touch!
Afterwards, we took our autumn treasure back to nursery and sorted it using our senses.