We will remember them – Remembrance Day 2018
The children listened to poems and stories, then talked about Remembrance Day this week at school. They made poppies and some wrote messages to the soldiers.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Laurence Binyon
Thank you to Mrs Thorne for her artistic input and Peter Smith, from Lyndhurst View, who made the central piece.
Bang! Pop! Whooosh!
There were lots of happy faces in Nursery on Monday morning and lots of excited tales of Halloween parties and firework related fun.
We enjoyed talking about the photographs that some parents and carers sent in from their holidays, but we’d love to see more. They’re a really great starting point for conversations and help to remind children about their activities at home. The ‘Understanding the World’ part of the Early Years Foundation Stage requires children to be able to freely communicate about their home life. Having a stimulus to look at with children, such as a leaflet for somewhere they have visited or a photograph, is a really big help when trying to begin a conversation. Equally, something as simple as you telling us at the beginning of the day or emailing us about something you have done, is a helpful way for us to initiate conversation with your child about their experiences.
Here are a few ideas of things that you can do at home to support your child in the ‘Understanding the World’ and ‘Communication and Language’ areas of the curriculum. They’re taken from a really useful document,‘What to expect, when?’. It breaks down the Early Years Foundation Stage into a more user and parent/ cared friendly version.
As you can imagine, conversations at the beginning of the week were largely about fireworks and Bonfire night parties.
We listened to music with loud firework sounds and talked about the noises they made. We tried to re-create the sounds in our small world area with the moving rocket, whoooosh!
We enjoyed lots of creative activities this week, both inside and outside. Children really enjoyed our large scale firework artwork; they practised some gross motor movements, splattering paint onto a large ‘night sky’. As you can see from the photographs, we try our best to keep messy activities as clean as they can be!
In maths, we’ve been investigating patterns and repeating colour patterns.
We always try to look out for children’s interests to guide our planning and create relevant learning opportunities. This week, children showed an interest in the Gingerbread Man story so we’re looking forward to exploring this story a little bit more next week.
Please read the Weekly Up-date for information regarding our Nursery Parent consultation meetings and lots of exciting Christmas dates. We’ll post them here soon.
Home Link – Half term holiday adventures
Please remember to tell us about your holiday adventures. You could send us some photographs or bring in a leaflet of somewhere you visited during the holidays.
You could tell us about baking, art activities, trips to the park, swimming, visits to farms/ museums or anything else that your child has enjoyed.
Children love to show their photographs on our interactive whiteboard and tell friends about their adventures. It’s a great way to increase confidence and also provides lots of conversation and opportunities to extend vocabulary.
We’ll look forward to seeing your emails in our inbox: scholesf1@spherefederation.org
We hope you’ve had a good holiday and are looking forward to seeing everyone this week.
Is there room on the broom?
There were some unusual footprints on the floor in Nursery on Monday morning!
Following on from the children’s interest in footprints last week, we looked closely at the shapes and sizes of the mysterious visitors’ prints. Children suggested different animals that they might belong to. The dog was the easiest to guess; many children recognised it because it looked like their pet dog’s muddy footprints. The frog, bird and ‘dragon/monster’ prints caused a bit of confusion.
In group time, we read ‘Room on the Broom’ and children joined in with the repeated refrains in the story. They’ve enjoyed using the story props to re-tell the story in the small world area.
Outside, we created a dragon’s cave and then decided that it would be a good idea to make our own dragon. We looked at some pictures of dragons and talked about the different colours and body parts. Next, we worked together to paint our dragon and added different materials to create scales and spikes.
Whilst reading ‘Room on the Broom’, children enjoyed the part of the story where the witch makes a magic potion in her cauldron. We made our own fizzing potions…
Iggity, ziggity, zaggety, ZOOOOOOOM!
If you’d like to try it at home, there’s one way to do it here. We just used bicarbonate of soda, white vinegar and food colouring in Nursery but there are many different versions. Not only is it fun, but it’s a good talking point and provides lots of opportunities to extend children’s vocabulary. We used pipettes in Nursery, which are a good way of helping to strengthen and develop children’s finger muscles.
We’ve made slime and investigated its properties: stretchy, slimy, sticky, runny…
On Monday, it was very windy so we went onto the KS1 playground with ribbon sticks to watch them dance in the wind.
It’s been a busy week so far and there are still two more days to go before half term.
Home Link – Room on the Broom
Our Home link activity this week is to enjoy reading ‘Room on the Broom’ together at home.
If you don’t have a copy, you could visit the library or watch an on-line version of the story here.
There are some fun activities and colouring sheets available to download on Julia Donaldson’s website. We’re going to try and make some mini broomsticks in Nursery this week. You could also print off some of the animal masks and try re-telling the story together at home using them.
Pumpkins
Children have loved exploring the pumpkins this week; we’ve rolled pumpkins, weighed pumpkins, drawn and painted on pumpkins, made pumpkins in the playdough and explored patterns on pumpkins in the maths area. At the end of the week, we especially enjoyed cutting them open to explore their slippery, slimy contents. What a lot of pumpkin-themed learning!
Thank you to everyone who completed our ‘Autumn bag’ Homelink activity. Children enjoyed sharing the contents of their bags with their friends during group time. This is a great way to encourage children to speak in front of their peers and to build their confidence. Children love to talk about things that they have done at home with friends and family and they especially like to show items that they have found.
If you’d like to do something creative at home over half-term, we’re sure that children would love to have a go at making a pumpkin bowl. They’d love tearing up the paper (which is good for developing finger strength) and getting messy joining in with the papier mache part of this art project. Some parts are trickier and would need an adult to help.
There’s a fun CBeebies ‘Peter Rabbit and the Giant Pumpkin’ story available to read on the Storytime app too.
Harvest Festival – a big thank you!
Thank you for all the kind donations to our Harvest Festival today. Henry, from the Salvation Army, was overwhelmed by the generosity of the families at Scholes. Thank you for each and every donation.
Chips, cheesy pizzas and caterpillars
We’ve followed a number of different interests in Nursery so far this week, from chips to caterpillars!
On Monday morning, whilst having ‘tea’ in the home corner, we were eating chips and talking about where they came from. Many children suggested the supermarket and Chinese take-away, but nobody knew which vegetable they were made from. We read a story called ‘Oliver’s Vegetables’. In the story, Oliver loves chips and they’re all he wants to eat. When he visits his Grandad, Oliver is only allowed to have chips for his tea when he can find the correct plant growing in his Grandad’s allotment. After a quick trip to the shops for some potatoes, children enjoyed making chips in the afternoon. They cleaned the potatoes and were very careful when cutting them into chip shapes. Their favourite part had to be eating them!
We also found a very unusual caterpillar in Nursery on Monday. It had green and black stripes and was very hairy. It even had a big, red spike on its back. Children were really excited about it and enjoyed using the magnifying glasses to look at it closely. They drew some great observational drawings and tried hard to copy the stripes and prickles. We tried to find out more about what type of caterpillar it was; we used a nature book and searched on Google until we found an answer. It was a Pale Tussock caterpillar which will eventually become a moth.
Look what I’ve found. It’s very prickly!
After lots of pizza shop role play, children became real pizza chefs on Tuesday and made their own pizzas. They spread the tomato paste onto the pitta breads, sprinkled the cheese on top and added a few basil leaves. This provided lots of opportunities for discussion, as we watched what happened to the cheese as it melted.
Nursery rhymes
So far this week, we have enjoyed singing lots of Nursery rhymes and favourite children’s songs. They seem to keep popping up everywhere in our play! Singing Nursery rhymes is a very important part of daily life in Nursery. There is a wealth of evidence to suggest that young children who regularly sing nursery rhymes, will go on to develop a love of literacy and language and will become confident readers.
- In our water area, children have loved making and pouring cups of tea. We wonder if you can guess which nursery rhyme we sang as we poured?
- We’ve made boats in our construction area and enjoyed singing ‘Row, row, row your boat’. Our favourite verse is when the crocodile appears in the stream, Arghhhhhh! Follow this link and you can enjoy singing along at home too.
- In the Quiet room, a group of children noticed a very large spider hiding behind the whiteboard. We counted the legs and talked about where spiders liked to live. Lots of children enjoyed singing Incy Wincy Spider!
Crazy about conkers!
As you will have probably noticed, we have a lot of conkers in Nursery at the moment and children are still enjoying finding more! It’s amazing just how many learning opportunities they have provided:
- counting
- weighing
- comparing sizes and ordering
- making patterns
- using tongs to pick them up (This is a great way to help children develop and strengthen the muscles of the hands and fingers.)
- observational drawing (Make sure you have a look at some of the artwork on display in the Rainbow room)
- conker rolling paintings
- discussions about texture
- conversations about the changes in seasons
- hide and seek games with friends outside
There are lots of Autumn activities you could do at home:
- The Woodland Trust has a selection of Nature Detectives activity sheets that you can download and print. Here is a link to the Autumn leaf Nature Detective sheet – you could go on a leaf hunt and see which leaves you can find. Talk about the different shapes, colours and sizes and don’t forget to tell us about your adventures at home.
- There are lots and lots of Autumn activities on the Imagination Tree’s website. We particularly like the creative ideas involving painting with different sticks and leaves and conker rolling in paint. It’s great to explore different ways of making marks and patterns.
- There are a few links to Autumn themed games and activities on the CBeebies website. We like to count leaves in our Nursery garden and enjoy having a go at ‘squigling’ using zig-zag and wavy lines.