Goodbye and good luck!
Sadly, Mrs Crompton will be leaving us on Friday to start a new job, closer to her home. We’d like to say thank you to Mrs Crompton for all of her hard work in Nursery over the last few years and we know that she will be missed. We wish her lots of luck in her new job.
Thank you and good luck, Mrs Crompton!
Shrove Tuesday
We had a great first day back at Nursery; it was Shrove Tuesday so we enjoyed making and eating pancakes at snack time. Children enjoyed mixing the ingredients together and watching Mrs Beesley cook them and flip them in the pan. We learnt a new rhyme as we cooked them. Can you say it together at home the next time you have pancakes?
Mix a pancake, stir a pancake, pop it in the pan. Fry a pancake, toss a pancake, catch it if you can!
Happy faces
This week, as part of our Expressive Arts and Design curriculum, we’ve re-visited learning to draw ourselves. We used mirrors to look at our faces and talked about what shape we needed to draw on the paper first. We then looked at our features and tried to add more details to our drawings such as hair, ears and eyes. Some children added tiny little lines for eye lashes and drew spirals for curly hair.
Have a go at home together. Can you draw each other? Start with a circle shape for your face and then add in some features.
You might have also spotted some funny faces on the table and window! We talked about some of the different faces that we make when we feel happy, sad, worried or angry and used iPads to take selfies of ourselves! In our loose parts area, we used the resources to create some of these faces with our friends. What could you use for the eyes? How would you make a sad face?
At the beginning of the week, children enjoyed some ‘red’ themed activities as there was a lot of excitement around Valentine’s Day. We cut out different sized heart shapes in the dough area and decorated them with crystals, we used mini hole punchers in the fiddly fingers area and there was a lot of activity in the mark making area as children created their own cards and signed their names.
We’ve also been busy building dens and obstacle courses with tunnels and slides in the Sunshine Room as the windy weather prevented us from being outside at the start of the week. In our small world area, we worked together to draw some roads and create a city to drive the cars around.
We hope that you all enjoy half term and we’ll see you on Tuesday 01 March when Nursery opens. Remember, we are closed on Monday for a Training Day.
If you’d like to send us a photograph of your favourite holiday activity or if your child wows you with something that they achieve during the week, please e-mail us. scholesnursery@spherefederation.org
Reminder – WORLD BOOK DAY
It’s World Book Day on Thursday 03 March and if your child chooses to, they can dress up as one of their favourite book characters and bring a copy of their favourite book to school. Please refer to the earlier school email for more details. Also, please be mindful of typical Nursery activities when choosing a costume – children need to be able to play both inside and outside comfortably and safely and they also need to be able to access the toilet easily in their costumes!
Please make sure you write their names on their books so that they make it home again for bed time.
Safety week
This week, we joined in with school’s safety themed week. We’ve been learning all about staying safe in lots of different situations, such as online safety and road safety.
We spotted things around Nursery that could be dangerous and talked about the things that we can do at school to stay safe, such as keeping the floor clear of toys so that we don’t trip, locking the Nursery gate to keep us safe and putting cones on our playground when the play equipment is too slippy to use. We also spotted things that could be dangerous in our homes.
During group time, we played a subitising maths game on our iPads. Before we did this, we talked about ways to stay safe whilst using technology at home such as making sure that we are near a grown up and using apps and games that our parents and carers have said are ok for us to play. We also agreed that we’d tell someone if we saw any thing that we didn’t like pop up on our screens.
On Tuesday, we had a special visitor in Nursery. Sue, our school crossing assistant, came to talk to us about how she helps to keep us safe on the road near school and about other things that we can do to stay safe when we’re walking near roads. We looked at Sue’s lollipop ‘stop’ sign and talked about why she wears a very bright coat. How is it different to Mrs Long’s coat?Outside, we made our own signs and made sure our Nursery roadway was safe as people played on the trikes.
Later in the week, we had some more special visitors…
Some firefighters came to visit and showed us some of the features of their fire engine. We were very lucky and got to try on their helmets and to hold the hose. The siren was very loud! We also talked about the ways they can help people who get into danger.
Talk to your child about keeping safe at home and about road safety. What can they remember? Can you think of some other ways to stay safe when trying different activities such as swimming or going to the park?
Happy New Year!
This week, we’ve enjoyed learning about the Chinese and Lunar New Year. We used non-fiction books to learn more about how some people like to celebrate across the world and we also watched these ‘Let’s celebrate‘ videos to find out about how some families in England prepare for the celebrations.
Children created their own ‘good luck’ banners by painting patterns on to red paper and during group time, we made paper lanterns. There was a lot of interest in our New Year topic table, with children enjoying looking at the paper dragons, fortune cookies and chop sticks. In the sensory area, we explored the texture of dry noodles and found out what happened when we added hot water. Our fingers also got a good work out as we tried to use the chopsticks to pick the noodles up.
We found out that some people like to give good luck cards and red envelopes containing money to their friends and family during the festival. In our maths area, we practised our subitising and counting skills as we counted out the correct number of coins to match the number/dots on each envelope. Some children really enjoyed this and went on to make their own coins and envelopes in the creative area.
One of the favourite activities from this week, had to be creating our own dragon dance. At the beginning of the week, we watched some dragon dancing and afterwards, children began to experiment using fabric and instruments to create their own interpretation of the dance. We practised walking together in a line and then introduced moving our bodies higher and lower in time to the music.
By the end of the week, we’d created our own dragon head and had perfected our dragon dance!
Finally, we also talked about the recent very windy weather. We listened to songs about the wind and waved ribbons using large arm movements to create shapes and watch the ribbons dancing in the wind.
What is ice?
On Tuesday morning, we arrived to a very cold Nursery and our garden was covered in frost and ice. When we went outside, children had lots of questions to ask about the frost, but nobody seemed too sure about how it had got there and where it went in the afternoon when the sun came out.
There was talk of snow, Jack Frost visiting and that it had fallen from the sky and that it ‘melted’ but children couldn’t explain what ‘melting’ means. We talked about lots of different things – ice, snow, frost, rain, water, freezers and melting and children were keen to investigate.
We looked at some ice from the freezer and predicted what would happen to it if we kept it out of the freezer in a bowl. Children suggested that the sun might make it melt and another child suggested that hot water might make it melt. We left some ice in our classroom, some in the sun outside and we also added hot water to some ice, too. We talked about how it changed and what happened to the ice in the different places. After lots of discussion, and after noticing that it melted in our hands as well, we worked out that when ice gets warmer, it melts and becomes water.
Why do we sometimes have ice in the Nursery garden in the morning? Children had lots of ideas and we decided to set up an experiment to see what would happen if we put some water in different containers over night. We also looked around the garden to find some natural objects to add into the water.
When we returned to Nursery on Wednesday, nothing had happened! We still had cups and pots of water. Why didn’t we have any ice? We tried again on Wednesday night, and on Thursday morning, we were very excited to find some ice. Again, after lots of discussion and ideas, we agreed that it had to be very, very cold at night for the water to freeze and turn into ice.
Have a go at making some ice at home. What do you need to do? Where do you need to put it? Ask your child to help you fill an ice cube tray with water and put it in the freezer. Check on it a few times the same day. Has anything happened? Leave it over night. What has happened to the water in the tray? Why? What does the freezer do?
Children have enjoyed reading ‘Dinosaur Roar’ this week, so we’ll continue with their interest in dinosaurs next week. We’ll be weighing dinosaur bones, investigating dinosaur footprints and drawing eyes, horns and sharp claws to create our own, fearsome dinosaurs.
Identity Day
Nursery is not taking part in ‘Identity Day’ on Friday (21.01.22) with school. Children need to wear their usual Nursery clothes or uniform. Thank you
Winter and welcome!
It was lovely to meet all of our new children and their families on Monday for their ‘stay and play’ session. We’ve enjoyed getting to know everyone this week and children have enjoyed exploring Nursery and playing with some familiar faces as well as beginning to make some new friends.
This week, we have learnt all about the number one. During group time, we passed around a mystery bag that was full of different items that were all linked to the number ‘one’. We looked at the numeral, a ‘one’ piece of Numicon, one counter on a five frame, one pebble, a hand holding up one finger, a unicycle, a dice, a circle, one brick and a few other ‘one’ related items. Can you think of any more? We talked all about the number ‘one’ and also did lots of actions once. We did one clap, one jump and one hop! See if you can spot the number one when you walk to Nursery, maybe on a house door or a number plate. We loved singing ‘One finger, one thumb‘ although it was quite tricky to remember all of the movements towards the end!
We’ve continued to learn about winter this week, talking about the changes in the weather that we noticed when playing outside. Unlike last week, we couldn’t find any ice in the morning and it was very sunny one afternoon – is it still winter? We talked about things that we might see outside in winter time and the clothing that we need to wear. At story time, we looked at a non-fiction book to find out some more information about winter.
In provision, children have enjoyed exploring winter further with some wintery themed enhancements including a ‘Frozen’ small world area and a wintery themed loose parts area.
Run, run as fast as you can!
It was great to see everyone again this week and we couldn’t believe how much some of you have grown over the Christmas holidays! Thank you for your festive photos; we enjoyed looking at them and talking about your family celebrations at group time.
Children returned brilliantly to Nursery and have settled back into our routines well. It’s been very cold this week so please make sure that your child has a warm coat, a hat and some gloves every day. We’re always trying to promote independence at Nursery, so please take some time at home to help your child to learn how to put on their own coat and gloves. Gloves are especially tricky, but give it a try! Remember to label items with your child’s name too so that we can help to return them at the end of the day.
This week, we’ve been reading the well know traditional tale of The Gingerbread Man. It’s a great story for children to recall and there are lots of repeated refrains for them to use when re-telling the story. Try and tell the story together at home. Can they remember the main parts? Encourage them to use the repeated refrains. ‘Run run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me I’m the Gingerbread Man.’ or ‘Stop! I want to eat you!’
The ginger playdough was very popular – we’ve lost count of how many gingerbread people have been made this week! Children have enjoyed investigating the cornflour gloop, too. It was hard and then sometimes runny, how strange!
Our maths focus this week, has been learning to make comparisons between objects relating to size and length. We looked at big/little/small/large gingerbread outlines and ordered them by size. During group time, we introduced some more specific vocabulary relating to height such as tall, taller, short and shorter. We stood back to back with our friends and compared our heights and we even had a go at measuring each other using ‘hands’. We carefully counted how many ‘hands’ tall we were. Mrs Crompton was 10 hands tall! Some children knew that tape measures are used to measure height and used them to measure their friends. After group time, some children went on to compare the heights of their water bottles and the size of their carrots at snack time.
Try to use some of this language at home this week in order to help your child consolidate their new vocabulary. Who is the tallest person in your family? Who is the shortest? Which teddy is the shortest? Which bottle is the tallest?
Here are a few other photographs from our play this week: constructing with 3D shapes on the light panel, learning to draw our faces in the creative area and more measuring and investigating capacity in our play ‘baking’ area.
Finally, the cold weather sparked lots of interest and discussion in the ice that children found in the garden each morning. We’ll continue with this interest next week, investigating ‘ice’ and learning more about winter time.
Information for children starting Nursery in January
It was great to meet some of you this week for your door step visit and we hope that you’re looking forward to joining us in Nursery on Monday for your ‘stay and play’ session. For those families that we were unable to meet, don’t worry, we’ll look forward to catching up with you on Monday.
Here is some of the important information that we discussed at the home visit.
‘Stay and play’ visit
- Please take a lateral flow test just before the ‘stay and play’ session and wear a mask during the visit. We’re asking that only one adult accompanies your child. If you test positive, please don’t attend and get in touch to let us know.
- Please come to the Nursery door (blue) on Monday (via Morwick Grove entrance).
- Remember to bring proof of your child’s date of birth (passport/ birth certificate).
What does my child need to bring to Nursery?
- A drawstring bag with a FULL change of clothes (underwear, socks/tights, trousers/leggings, a top and jumper.) Make sure that everything is clearly NAMED
- A NAMED pair of wellies to remain at Nursery
- Children play out in all weather, so please make sure that your child wears a a warm, waterproof coat each day and has a hat and gloves during winter. Don’t forget to NAME them all!
- A NAMED water bottle
Arrival and collection
- Red and yellow group – Entry through the main Nursery entrance at 9am.
- Blue and green group – Entry to the Sunshine room through the Nursery playground at 9am.
- Collection at the end of the day – Nursery closes at 2.15pm on Monday and 3.15pm Tuesday-Friday. Children can be collected from 3.05pm onwards (or 2.05pm on Monday) to help reduce congestion at collection times. For children attending for the morning session, collection is at 12pm.
If you have any other questions, please let us know. For non-urgent enquiries during term time, you can email us and we will try to reply as soon as we can during the working day, once we’ve finished teaching. scholesnursery@spherefederation.org If you have an urgent enquiry, please call school and speak to the office.
We look forward to seeing you all on Monday and hope that you’re getting excited about coming to play!