2022-2023
Welcome to Nursery!
(w/b 5th September)
This week we have been exploring our classroom and the outdoor area. We have made new friends, learnt new names and spoken about our classroom rules. We have also been getting used to our nursery routine and making sure that we are listening carefully to our teachers and our friends.
Marvellous Me!
(w/b 12th September)
We have been learning about our bodies this week. We have learnt the names of many different body parts and have been identifying our own facial features in a mirror. We have looked at our lovely baby photos and discussed how we have changed since our photos were taken.
My Body
(w/b 19th September)
We have been superheroes this week! Our superhero headquarters has been busy as we try to save the world! We have learnt how to move our bodies in different ways, just like different superheroes do. We have learnt a variety of superhero skills such as balancing, jumping, throwing and running. We have spoken about the importance of eating a healthy diet to keep our bodies strong and to help us move in different ways.
How do you feel?
(w/b 26th September)
This week we have been exploring a range of emotions and feelings. Curiosity Cat has helped us to talk about different feelings and that it is ok to have different feelings at different times. We used the tale of Humpty Dumpty to help us explore being sad and upset. We tried to make Humpty Dumpty feel better by putting him back together again! We also explored how music makes us feel. We listened to different types of music and painted how we were feeling. Another very popular activity was using our new nursery iPads to take pictures of our friends showing different emotions on their faces.
Fun with Families
(w/b 3rd October)
This week we have been learning that each of us is part of a family. We discussed how family members are joined together by caring for each other. We looked at extended families and the fact that some of us have very small families and some much bigger. Some of us have families that live in another country. We had the very popular home corner in our role play lab this week. Everyone enjoys cooking breakfast and dinner for each other, washing the dishes and cleaning the laundry. We made our own family trees and we shared 'my family' booklets that we filled in at home.
Fun with Friends
(w/b 10th October)
During this week we discussed what makes a good friend. We talked to each other about the importance of sharing and taking turns and using kind voices when having discussions. We learnt that it is important to say sorry if we have made a mistake. We used the story 'Lost and Found' to explore the concept of friendship and we then made our own penguins linked to the story. We then made our friendship bracelets and gave them to each other. We had to work on our fine motor control when threading the beads, they were a little tricky!
Autumn Antics
(w/b 17th October)
This week we had a great time exploring the season of autumn. We learnt that autumn is one of 4 seasons and it has its own set of characteristics. During our autumn walk we spotted leaves that were changing colours and falling off of the trees. We also learnt about how the weather changes in the autumn and the fact that it gets dark earlier and earlier! Our theme book for the week was one of our favourites...The Gruffalo! Following on from the story we learnt about what different animals do in the autumn and how some hibernate until the weather gets warmer again. When exploring outside we went on a Gruffalo hunt in the forest but we had to make sure we didn't get gobbled up!
Apples and Pumpkins
(w/b 31st October)
Wow! What a lot of apples and pumpkins we had in our classroom! We've been painting them, scooping them, rolling them and planting them! We even dipped some of our apples in chocolate! During our snack time the adults cut apples in half and we discovered something hiding in every single one...a star! We also spoke about the seeds in get in apples and pumpkins can be planted to grow new plants and in time, more apples and pumpkins. Our theme book this week was 'Pumpkin soup'. We learnt how important it is to work together and when we do we can produce fantastic things.
Sensational Senses
(w/b 7th November)
This week we have explored all of our senses. We used our sense of hearing in the role play lab where we set up our very own nursery band. We explored ways to play the instruments quietly and loudly. We had a dark den to explore our sense of sight. we learnt that we can't see very well in the dark so explored ways to make it easier such as using torches. One of our adult-led activities was tasting different foods and exploring what our taste buds do.
Pants Safety
(w/b 14th November)
Aliens invaded our nursery this week! To help us explore the importance of pants safety we used the story 'Aliens Love Underpants'. We have learnt the important message that pants are private. We explored the difference between good touches, such as a hug and bad touches, such as using unkind hands. During this theme we also spoke about people who we can trust at nursery and at home and if we are ever worried we can talk to those trusted people.
Being Healthy
(w/b 21st November)
Following on from our theme last week about keeping ourselves safe we having now been learning how to keep our bodies healthy. We had our own nursery gym and we learnt how when we exercise our heart beats faster which sends blood whizzing round to our muscles. We have been learning about the importance of looking after our teeth through brushing after meals and also not eating too much sugar. During snack time we explored a range of fruit and vegetables and discussed which ones were our favourites. we even tried a grapefruit which made lots of us pull a funny face!
Transport
(w/b 28th November)
This is a very popular theme in nursery. The children are always wanting to play with the train track and cars and this theme has given them the opportunity to explore these resources even further. We have learnt about how different vehicles move such as sail boats, cars, trains, hot air balloons and aeroplanes. Our adult-led activities this week were very exciting. We went out to do a traffic survey and record all of the different vehicles that pass by our school. We even got waves from the bus drivers! Our second activity was using our new Beebot robot and tactile reader. The children practised using directional language such as forwards, backwards, left and right and then programmed the Beebot to travel around a map. We really enjoyed it!
Winter
(w/b 5th December)
This week we have been learning all about winter! We used the much loved story 'Stick Man' to help us with our explorations. For one of our adult-led activities we even made our own Stick Men and Stick Lady Love from sticks that we gathered from our forest. We had great fun with the snowballs and had our own indoor snowball fight. In the science lab we had a lot of ice to explore. We had to try and rescue the animals that had been frozen inside. Some of us tried hitting the ice but it was very hard! We tried rubbing our hands on it and this did start to melt it but made our hands very cold. We ended up putting the ice on the radiator and this melted it much faster!
Christmas
(w/b 12th December)
Christmas has arrived in nursery! We have been very busy practising for our Christmas performance and worked really hard to learn lots of festive songs. We even made our own Christmas headbands to wear for our performance. Thank you to all of the families that came to listen to our singing! We hope you enjoyed the songs and the tasty hot chocolate and mince pies! Merry Christmas!
Link letter
Welcome to Nursery!
(w/b 9th January)
This week we welcomed new families and friends to our nursery. It is always an exciting time at the beginning of a new term and we had so many new friends to make! This was a great opportunity for all of our existing children to share their knowledge and understanding of our classroom routines and expectations with their new friends. We had lots of mini teachers for the week! We spent time learning new names, exploring our different learning environments and revisiting our class rules so we knew how to keep ourselves and others safe.
Making Music
(w/b 16th January)
Wow, what a busy week we have had! Our 'making music' theme is always very popular with the children with one of the favourite activities being exploring some of the more unusual musical instruments. We went up to the music room in the big school when we listened to the story 'Walking Through the Jungle' and explored different sounds and movements we could make for each of the jungle animals. We had the rainbow boomwhackers out in the music lab. We enjoyed exploring how the sound the boomwhacker made changed depending on the length of the instrument. For an adult-led activity we made our own musical instruments and had a great time playing them and creating different rhythms and beats.
Art and Artists Part 1
(w/b 23rd January)
What a colour week we have had! Our classroom was full of the brightest colours and patters! We have been learning all about famous artists and their artwork. We learnt about colour mixing and began to identify the three primary colours and say what happened when they were mixed together. We looked at a variety of abstract artwork and discussed what we could see in each picture. As an adult-led activity we went on an art hunt around the school, looking at all of our lovely artwork and beginning to say what we liked and why. Our theme book was Elmer and we really enjoyed identifying all of the different colours that made up Elmer's patchwork skin. When we were outside we made our own chalk rainbows. We found that it was quite a tricky skill to get all of the colours sat next to each other but we didn't let the challenge put us off and we made some BEAUTIFUL rainbows!
Art and Artists Part 2 (maths eyes)
(w/b 30th January)
We carried on with our art and artists theme this week but had more of a maths focus for our learning. For our adult-led activity we made our own artwork inspired by Kandinsky. We identified the different, colourful circles used in Kandinsky's work and tried to recreate this using colourful paper shapes and tissue paper. For our next activity we went on a colour hunt around school. It was a big challenge to find all of the colours on our sheet but we managed it and some groups even found colours that we not on the sheet! In our role-play art gallery we looked at Mondrian and his famous artwork consisting of lots of rectangles painted in primary colours. From our learning last week we could identify the colours and we even had a go out counting all of the rectangles!
Ways to say I Love You!
(w/b 6th February)
This week we have been exploring our emotions. We have learnt about the different feelings and emotions that we have and how we can recognise them. We discussed the people that we love and how we can show that we love them. We love our ways to say I love you display which has so many different ways to say I love you in a variety of languages. Thank you to those families that made contributions to this activity! We made a Valentines themed biscuit as one of our adult-led activities and discussed who we might share our biscuit with at home. It seems some of us were a little reluctant to share (they were rather delicious)!
Where we Live
(w/b 20th February)
We have all really enjoyed ourselves this week! We have been learning all about our local area and the houses/buildings we live in. For our adult-led activities we went on a local area walk and discussed the buildings we could see. We then read the story of the Three Little Pigs and acted out the main parts using our pig and wolf masks. Outside in the village, we had our own little pigs houses with materials in for us to test how strong the pigs' houses were. Luckily we didn't see a big bad wolf! During Curiosity time we used Google Maps to look at some of our houses and explore the local area further.
We love books!
(w/b 27th February)
It is safe to say that we really do love books in nursery! This week we explored books by one of our favourite authors, Julia Donaldson. We learnt that all books have an author and illustrator and we began to explore how books have a beginning, middle and end. All of the labs in our classroom had book related activities in, we made butterflies like the character we met in Monkey Puzzle and we designed our own book covers in the style of Axel Scheffler. One of our favourite activities was building a home for the Gruffalo! We all loved our shared reading session we held on World Book Day. Thank you to all of the families that were able to attend!
Pants Safety
(w/b 8th May)
This week we have been learning about why it is important that we keep our pants private. This is a theme that we look at lots over the year and we talked about people that we can trust and talk to about secrets that upset us. We all know why we need to keep our pants private, and we sang along to our ‘pantosaurus’ song.
Splash into Summer
(w/b 15th May)
This week we have been learning all about summer! We enjoy learning about the different seasons and noticing all of the changes, even though we are not in summer quite yet, we are learning all about ways that we can keep safe at home and at nursery. This includes things like sunscreen, sun hats and making sure that our shoulders are covered so they don’t get burnt. We have enjoyed all of our activities about summer, especially when we got to paint with the ice.
Minibeasts
(w/b 22nd May)
This week we have been going outside for our learning all about Minibeasts! We have been looking around our playground looking for all different types of insects from butterflies, all the way to ants, we have enjoyed looking at all of them. In our carpet sessions we have been looking at the different habitats insects live in and how they don’t just live in our houses. In our adult activities, we have even been making our own habitats for the insects to live in, leaving them in our forest and checking in on them throughout the week.
Six Legs or Eight
(w/b 5th June)
This week we have continued learning about minibeasts, but with a maths eyes twist! We have talked about the different legs that insects have and that a spider is an ‘arachnid’ because it has eight, but we have also enjoyed painting symmetrical butterflies and working together to complete different puzzles.
Pet Parade
(w/b 12th June)
During this week we were learning all about the different types of pets, from small hamsters all the way up to horses and we were thinking about the different ways that we can care for them. In our classroom, we were able to explore what it is like to take our pets to the vets and all of the ways that they can help our pets to feel better. On Tuesday we had a special visitor, Miss Lacey’s dog Millie came in to see us and we got to learn about how Millie needs to be fed, washed and even have her teeth brushed! We all really enjoyed meeting Millie and talking about the pets that we have at home.
Baa Baa Moo
(w/b 19th June)
Throughout this theme, we learnt all about the different types of animals you would find on a farm, as well as learning about the types of ‘produce’ you can get from animals. We also had the opportunity of ‘Gemma’s Farm’ coming to visit us on our school field where we get to meet a range of animals that she has on her farm, feed them, pet them and have a chance to hold them!
Zoo Clues
(w/b 26th June)
This week has been learning about a different type of animals: Zoo animals! We had our classroom turned into a zoo and got the chance dress up as lions, zebra, elephants and giraffe’s. We learnt about the importance of making sure the animals are looked after by the zoo keepers and even learnt about flamingos and ostriches
Under the Sea
(w/b 3rd July)
We have had a lot of fun learning about under the sea and getting a chance to explore this theme through our classroom’s labs. Our role play included a deep sea dive where we dressed up as scuba divers to take a look at the different animals we could see under the sea. Our activities this week included making button starfish, looking at their patterns as well as making jiggling jellyfish, where we talked about how we must not touch their tentacles.
