Staying safe
Staying safe
As part of our learning about ‘Staying safe’, some children joined an online assembly hosted by Yorkshire Water all about water safety. Children listened really carefully to the safety messages and were great at spotting potential dangers near lakes and canals.
We also learnt all about how to stay safe when visiting a beach. We know to look for areas that are supervised by lifeguards and which colour flag means that it’s safe to swim.
Help at home: For older children in red, blue and green group – Talk to your child about what they remember from the assembly. Can they remember what the different flags mean on the beach? What does a red flag show? Which colour flag means it’s safe to swim?
During group time, we looked at other ways to stay safe around our homes and when we’re at school. We sorted some pictures into ‘safe’ and ‘not safe’ and talked about our reasons. Children quickly identified dangerous activities at a playground and knew lots of ways to stay safe when crossing a road. We also talked about being with an adult when helping to cook and remembering to stay away from hot cooker hobs and sharp knives.
Pirates
When playing in Nursery this week, children have loved drawing treasure maps! We used a map during group time to hide some treasure. Children had to carefully follow instructions using positional language. The favourite places were on top of the volcano and behind the mermaid.
The construction area has also been a hive of activity and creativity. Children have worked together to build tall towers and a big bus for their trip to a dinosaur museum!
Outside, we joined in with some dance routines where children had to put together a sequence of movements to their favourite song.
Children also loved using pipettes and playing with the frogs in the ‘5 Little Speckled Frogs’ water tray and working with their friends to create a very long ramp! After the stormy weather, there were a lot of little apples on the floor that children enjoyed collecting and rolling down the guttering.
Reminders
On Wednesday 17 July, it’s our Nursery party. Please see the letter that we sent last week for more details. Children can wear summery clothes, but remember that footwear needs to be safe for them to run and play outside in.
The end of term is rapidly approaching! Remember to take all of your child’s belongings (including bags and wellies) home with them at the end of their last session in Nursery.
Ahoy there!
Children enjoyed listening to ‘Pirates Love Underpants‘ and we’ve been busy digging for treasure in the sand tray and counting gold coins in the maths area.
During maths group times, we’re learning about positional language. Next week, we’re going to use treasure maps of the Nursery garden to find some treasure. Children will need to use lots of positional language to describe where the treasure is hidden. For example, the treasure might be next to the sandpit, underneath the bridge, behind the planter or on top of the bird table.
Help at home: Try to use positional language in your day to day conversations and during play. For example -Can you put your teddy underneath the box? The car is behind the garage. The monkey is on top of the tree. Put your shoes next to the cupboard. As you look at illustrations in a story, ask questions such as ‘Where is the cat hiding?’ or ‘What can you see in front of the fence?’
The older children have also been busy visiting Reception and have enjoyed exploring and playing in their new classrooms. We’ll continue to visit over the final few weeks as part of our transition process.
Reminders-
- Please send your child with a waterproof coat everyday. The weather is very mixed at the moment and we enjoy playing out in all weather, even when it’s warm but wet!
- A few water bottles have missing names. Please take a minute to re-label your child’s bottle if it has come off.
Obstacle courses
One of the Prime Areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage is Physical development. Throughout the year, children have been developing their movement and balancing skills in a variety of ways. This week, we enjoyed taking part in an obstacle course. They balanced along the beams and walked across the wobble boards, trying carefully not to fall off.
At the end of the course, children showed us that they could balance on one leg without wobbling!
Next week’s learning
Following on from our learning about the seaside, we’re going to listen to ‘Pirates love underpants!’ next week. (This is a YouTube link. Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip.)
We’re sure you can imagine the role play that this will inspire… Look out for treasure maps in children’s folders soon!
Nursery rhyme of the week – Jack and Jill
Phonics – Children in Red, Blue and Green group will be playing games to practise some key phonics skills including:
- identifying initial sounds in words (playing I-Spy type games)
- segmenting and blending words orally (e.g. h-a-t and b-u-s)
- spotting rhyming words
Sun, sun, sun!
As the weather is set to be warm this week, here are a few reminders from our previous communications.
Sun safe reminders
- Bring a named sunhat every day.
- Ensure your child has a water bottle (named).
- Parents and carers must apply cream before nursery.
- Please put your child’s name on their sun cream.
- Put sun cream in your child’s group basket if you want it applying at lunchtime. Please don’t leave it in their bag.
- Collect your child’s sun cream at the end of the day.
- Help us out by using ‘All day’ cream and applying at home.
Sharing a Shell
During story time this week, we read ‘Sharing a Shell‘ by Julia Donadlson. We talked about trips to the seaside and some of the things that we’d found on the beach.
Seaside photographs
Thank you to everyone that has sent in a seaside photograph so far. It’s not too late if you’d like to email us one photograph of your child at the seaside – we’ll look at them during snack time and talk about our favourite things to do on the beach.
Children have enjoyed exploring shells and sorting them into different shapes and sizes. We painted some large scallop shells and also used wax crayons to rub over paper placed over the top of shells. Children noticed the patterns and stripes of the shell as they rubbed over the shell.
In maths, we’ve been learning about capacity. We’ve been talking about when something is ‘full’ or ’empty’.
Help at home: Use these words together at home when you’re playing, in the bath or cooking. Is it full or empty? How do you know?
Next week’s learning
We’ll continue with our sea side theme and will listen to ‘Commotion in the Ocean‘ at story time to find out about different sea creatures.
Nursery rhyme of the week – Ring a ring a roses
Phonics – Children in Red, Blue and Green group are re-visiting all of the sounds they have learnt this year and will be playing games to practise some key phonics skills including:
- identifying initial sounds in words (playing I-Spy type games)
- segmenting and blending words orally (e.g. h-a-t and b-u-s)
- spotting rhyming words
Hot and Cold countries
Following on from our discussions about journeys and holidays, this week, we looked at some photographs of hot and cold countries. We talked about the weather and thought about which animals live in hot places and which live in colder areas.
We used the animal stencils in the mark making area; it was quite tricky to hold them and trace around the edge but we persevered! We also enjoyed practising our cutting skills as we cut around different items of clothing to choose which we’d need to pack if we were going to visit a hot or cold place.
In the dough, we rolled long and short snakes and compared their lengths with our friends. In the Creative area, we mixed different shades of blues and thought about which colours remind us of hot and cold things. Finally, in the sensory area, children loved playing with the penguins and polar bears in the ice.
Next week’s learning
We’ll read ‘Sharing a Shell‘ and talk about our trips to the seaside. If you’ve been to the beach recently, please email us a photograph to share at snack time over the next few weeks. Thank you.
Nursery rhyme of the week – Row, row, row your boat
Phonics – We continue to learn about rhyming words. Can you think of any words that rhyme with cat?
Journeys
Children returned to Nursery happily on Monday and enjoyed telling us about their holiday adventures. These conversations led to us to talk about different types of transport, including trains, boats and planes.
We sorted and counted lots of vehicles in the maths area and built a train with carriages in the construction area. Children made tickets to sell to the passengers as they got on board.
During story times, we’ve enjoyed hearing about the adventures of ‘The Little Red Train‘ and watching a song about a magic train ride. We looked closely at the detailed illustrations in the Little Red Train books and talked about the different places that Duffy, the driver, visited. Was it the city, countryside or seaside? How did they know?
Children drew a map of the journey; the train started in the city and travelled past farms in the countryside and went through a dark tunnel before it reached the seaside.
Children loved using the remote controlled cars this week and were able to move them backwards and forwards between the obstacles.
In group time, we talked about night and day and next week, we’ll move on to ordering key events in our daily routines .
Help at home: Talk to your child about day and night time. What activities do people do in the day and at night? What do they do in the morning/afternoon/evening?
After lots of interest in pouring the PVA glue between containers in the craft area, we decided to add to slime to our sensory area. It was a big, albeit messy, hit!
We’ve also enjoyed fire fighter role play (Do you like our safety helmets?), making planes and spaceships and practising our cutting skills.
Next week’s learning:
For the final half term, we’ll revisit all of the sounds we have learnt and we will focus on key phonics skills such as identifying initial sounds, spotting rhymes and segmenting and blending words.
Over the next few weeks, our focus will be on oral ‘segmenting and blending’ skills. This is when we segment words into sounds and learn how to blend them together. Segmenting and blending orally is an important skill for children to acquire before they begin the more formal teaching of phonics in Reception. We practise segmenting and blending sounds that we can hear in words, we don’t expect children to recognise or write the letters in Nursery. This skill is quite tricky and can take children some time to grasp; it will continue to be taught throughout the Foundation Stage.
To segment ‘bus’, we would say ‘b – u – s’ . We always use pure sounds and try to avoid putting ‘uh’ on the end of a sound. E.g. ‘ssss’ not ‘suh’.
Please don’t hesitate to ask Nursery staff for any further information with how to support your child at home.
Beautiful butterflies
We had a lovely surprise on Tuesday morning when we returned to Nursery; we had a butterfly that had emerged from its chrysalis. There was a lot of interest in the butterfly house. We talked about the life cycle of a butterfly and what we needed to do next to look after the butterflies. Children helped to feed the butterflies with an orange and left over fruit from snack time.
Children enjoyed watching as their wings opened out and they began to fly around in the butterfly net. The sunny weather on Friday was perfect for releasing our butterflies before the weekend. It was lovely to watch them fly away and one landed on some flowers in one of our pots so we got to watch it for a little bit longer.
Next week’s learning:
We’ll learn about shapes next week and will be looking for shapes all around us.
Sound of the week – Z for zebra
Nursery rhyme of the week – Jack and Jill
Tiny tadpoles
Have you seen the tadpoles in Nursery? Children are fascinated watching them wriggle and swim around the tank. We’ve been learning about the life cycle of a frog and know that the next stage in the cycle is for the tadpoles to grow back legs. We keep looking at them closely to check for signs of legs.
In maths, we’ve been singing ‘5 Little Speckled Frogs‘ and have been carefully counting how many frogs are left on the log after each verse.
How many frogs jumped into the pond? How many are on the log? If there are 3 frogs on the log, how many are there in the pond?
Our other learning and interests this week have included:
- Rolling tiny balls of playdough to balance on the suction cups and using the tools to roll the dough as flat as we can before using a cutter.
- Lots of physical activity including balancing and swinging!
- Making more cheesy pizzas in our role play area.
Next week’s learning:
We saw lots of insects this week and there was a lot of interest in a bee that we found. Children enjoyed looking at the wings and stripes closely on it using the magnifying app on an iPad. Next week, we’ll follow this interest and find out about bees and ladybirds.
Sound of the week – Y for yoyo
Nursery rhyme of the week – Ring-a-ring-a-roses
Spider Sandwiches
This week, children have been searching for spiders in Nursery and looking for their webs. We sang Incy Wincy Spider and made spiders in the malleable area using playdough. First, we had to roll a ball to make the body and then we rolled sausage shapes to add on the legs. Some children managed to count 8 legs to put on their spiders!
In the maths area, we sorted spiders by size and counted spiders carefully to match the numeral written on each web. During group time, older children counted spiders and looked at which web had the most/fewest spiders. We also talked about what happened if we had ‘one more’ or ‘one less’ spider on the web. For example: ‘There are 4 spiders on the web, 1 spider runs away. How many will be left? How do you know?’
In our phonics group time, the older children learnt a new sound -V. We looked at some objects and had to listen carefully to the sound that they started with. Can you hear a ‘V’ sound at the beginning of the word? Which is the odd one out?
Help at home:
For children moving into Reception in September, play games like ‘I spy’ where you have to listen carefully to the initial sounds in words. Get three objects, two that begin with the same sound and one that starts with a different sound. Can they spot the odd one out and tell you why? E.g. car, cookie, banana.
For children that are in yellow group and will stay in Nursery next year, begin to listen to sounds around you as you’re out and about. What can children hear in their environment? Can they hear birds singing, a fridge humming, a bell ringing?
Our other learning and interests this week have included:
- Making collages and learning how to join different materials together in the creative area.
- Re-telling one of our favourite stories from earlier in the year, ‘The Gingerbread Man’, with our friends.
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- Throwing small hoops and aiming to get them on the cones. How many did you get on? Who got the most onto the purple cone?
- Drawing patterns and writing our names in the sand.
- And…enjoying some sunny weather!
Next week’s learning:
Have you seen the tadpoles in Nursery? Next week, we’ll learn about the life cycle of a frog and check to see if there have been any changes to our caterpillars. They were VERY big at the end of last week!
Sound of the week – W for wave
Nursery Rhyme of the week – 5 Little Speckled Frogs