Class photographs Tuesday 11th June
Nursery children will have their class photograph taken on Tuesday 11th June. If your child does not usually attend Nursery on this day, but you would like them to be included in the photograph, please come to the main school office at 9.30am. Children will be collected from the Reception area by a member of Nursery staff and will return shortly afterwards. Parents/carers must remain in the Reception waiting area during this time. Please let a member of staff know if you are planning to come along on Tuesday. Thank you.
Busy little bees!
Before the holidays, children were really interested in the bees that they saw in our Nursery garden. As a result of this, lots of our learning and activities have been linked to bees this week.
In maths, we looked at the shapes in a bee hive. Children enjoyed playing with hexagons and arranging them in different patterns. We also talked about the patterns on bees and created our own repeating colour patterns.
The activity in our sensory area was very popular; children loved squeezing the pipettes to suck up the nectar from each flower and drop it into the honeycomb. This activity was great for strengthening their finger muscles.
At snack time, we tasted both set and runny honey and we even got to try some honey comb. Lots of children weren’t very keen on trying the honey at first but as they saw their friends sampling the honey on toast, they soon joined in. Well done, Nursery. It’s always good to try something new.
At the end of the week, we were really lucky as Andy, a local bee keeper, came to visit us. He brought an observational hive for us to look at and explained all about the Queen bee and how the bees make honey. We learnt lots of new facts about bees. Did you know that bees have 5 eyes?
At the end of Andy’s talk, he brought lots of bee suits for us to try on. It was great fun. Andy loves bees! He spends lots of his spare time looking after the bees at Temple Newsam where the Leeds Beekeeper’s Association is based. We really enjoyed meeting Andy and his bees and would like to thank him for visiting us. Thank you, Andy!
Thursday – Sports clothing
On Thursdays, for the next 6 weeks, the older children in Nursery will be taking part in some sporting activities and games with a PE coach.
Please send children to Nursery on Thursdays wearing appropriate sports clothing and footwear. Thank you.
For more details, please refer to the letter that was sent out before the holidays.
More pizzas!
Welcome back to Nursery. We hope you all had a good, relaxing week off and enjoyed some family time. Thank you to everyone who sent us some information and photos from your adventures; children loved sharing them with their friends during group time.
The children were very excited returning to Nursery this morning and couldn’t wait to explore and play with their friends. Just before the holidays, we created a New pizza role play area. It was very popular today!
Do you remember that we had a pizza role play area at the beginning of the year? Well, a number of children had remembered and had asked several times if we could have it back in Nursery again. We’ve made it slightly different this time; we’ve added playdough and a selection of Italian herbs for them to sprinkle on their pizzas. Children are loving creating new pizzas and adding toppings.
It’s rewarding to see how much their play has developed since the start of the year. They’re using some great language to take orders and are role playing being in a restaurant with each other, including writing down their orders.
Happy holidays!
Chicks
Here are a few photographs from our first encounter with the new chicks. As you can see from our faces, we were captivated by them and amazed at how tiny they were.
Three more chicks hatched over night so we now have seven. We’ll keep you updated with their progress.
Cheep cheep!
What an egg-citing day! This morning, we noticed that one of the eggs in the incubator had a little hole in it and we could hear some chirping coming from inside. We were very excited and waited patiently, peeking in the incubator throughout the morning. By lunchtime, a chick had hatched fully and it was followed shortly afterwards by 2 more.
We can’t wait to see if the other eggs will hatch over night. Please call into Nursery this week and have a look.
Meet Feather, Chicky and Hattie! The fourth chick hatched right at the end of the day so still needs a name. Let us know your suggestions.
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We’ll post some more photos soon.
Tadpoles and frogs
This week, we enjoyed learning a little bit more about our wriggly guests in Nursery. We looked at the tadpoles carefully and drew them using fine liners; they were too quick to look at with our Exploroscope!
Children loved singing ‘Five Little Speckled Frogs’. Here’s a link to a video in case you don’t know the song so that you can sing a long at home!
In the sensory area, we had ‘tapioca’ frogspawn and tadpoles. It was great fun to scoop it up and look at all of the little jelly balls. It looked like tiny tadpole eggs which we learnt is called frogspawn. We enjoyed finding out about the life cycle of a frog and children can’t wait for the legs to begin to grow.
It was a very wet week but that didn’t stop us from taking our learning outside. We made potions and explored colour mixing in the rain. As we were making our potions, we noticed that we could smell something. After a little bit of investigating, we realised that it was the herbs that we could smell. We talked about fresh basil on pizzas and the smell of mint reminded us of brushing our teeth.
Some children noticed that the water in the tray changed colour when they added some paint. This led to lots of conversations regarding colour mixing and how to make the blue water change to purple or green.
The Evil Pea strikes!
Oh, what fun we’ve had in Nursery this week! Continuing with our love of the Supertato stories, this week, the Evil Pea visited Nursery and has been up to mischief.
On Tuesday, he kidnapped all of the carrots from our snack bowl and hid them outside. Children were very excited trying to spot them all from the window and couldn’t wait to get outside to find them and set them free. Children worked together to figure out how to get them down from all of the different places, high and low.
Once the carrots had been set free, we used a giant tens frame to count how many we had found and marked on our carrot clipboards.
The children were very excited and couldn’t wait to see what the Evil Pea would get up to next!
On Wednesday, he had visited Nursery and left us a letter.
The Evil Pea had captured all of the vegetables from our fridge and locked them up outside. Luckily for us, he must have dropped his map on the way out and so we had a clue to follow.
We drew on the locations of the keys that we could see in our garden and went outside to hunt for the missing keys.
Children quickly found the keys and began to try and unlock the mini padlocks. However, the keys didn’t fit! With a bit of team work, they figured out that the coloured bands on the padlocks must match the colours on the keys. Phew! The locks opened and the veggies were free.
Our visit from The Evil Pea caused lots of excitement in Nursery and stimulated some fantastic conversations as a result of his mischievous deeds.
Children demonstrated lots of the ‘characteristics of effective learning’ during these activities; they were… motivated, curious, exploring, engaging, pretending, solving problems, deciding, negotiating, thinking, focussing, persisting, concentrating and proud of their achievements.
Outside, we practised aiming and throwing by trying to knock Evil Pea and his friends off their spots and squirting them with water! These activities are a great way to develop both gross and fine motor skills from the Physical Development part of the Early Years curriculum. Squirting water definitely helped to strengthen finger muscles!
Get active with orienteering – FREE EVENT
Your local orienteering club, AIRIENTEERS, are hosting a FREE orienteering event especially for juniors, families and anyone new to the sport.
PLACE : Millennium Field, off Barleyfields Ct, Wetherby, LS22 6FZ
DATE : Saturday 11th May 1:30-2:30
There will be courses with electronic timing for all ages.
See www.aire.org.uk for more information about the races.
Start any time from 1:30 to 2:30. Just turn up and run.
