Home Link – Easter Songs
Over the next two weeks, we’ll be singing some Easter songs and rhymes. It would be great if you could enjoy singing them at home together too.
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Five Little Chicks (Sung to the tune of Five Little Ducks)
Five little chicks went walking one day,
into the barn and around the hay.
Mother hen says, “Cluck, cluck, cluck, CLACK!”
And four little chicks came wandering back.
Four little chicks…
Three little chicks…
Two little chicks…
One little chick went walking one day,
into the barn and around the hay.
Mother Hen says, “Cluck, cluck, cluck, CLACK!”
And five little chicks came wandering back.
You could use some props whilst singing ‘5 Little Chicks’. Lots of shops sell mini chicks for £1 that you could use. Ask your child to count out 5 and then take one away each time.
Home Link – Shapes
As part of the Maths EYFS curriculum, children need to be able to talk about the shapes of everyday objects. They’re encouraged to play with shapes and to spot familiar shapes in their environment. As they become more confident, they may begin to name 2D and 3D shapes and be able to talk about their properties (e.g. number of sides/corners, straight/curved).
This week, we’d like you to talk all about shapes. Here are some ideas of activities that you might like to do together.
- Go on a Shape hunt inside or outside (e.g. clock – circle). Take photos of the different shapes that you find.
- Make a shape picture. What would be a good shape for a… door, wheel or a fish’s tail?
- Find a selection of objects in the house that you could dip in paint to print with. What shape print does it make?
- Push different shaped objects into playdough – what shape print does it leave? Are there straight lines or curved lines? Are there some lines that are long/short?
- Collect some objects you can find in your house that are 3D shapes, e.g. cereal packet, crisp tubes, boxes of tea, oranges and DVDs. Sort them out into groups of the same shapes. How many objects do you have with corners? How many round objects do you have? How many have curved edges or sides?
- Take part in a shape scavenger hunt. See if you can find: 5 round objects, 4 tall objects, 3 objects with straight sides and 2 objects with more than 4 sides. Take a picture of what you find.
You can watch Mr Maker’s shape video and a song all about shapes.
You may have lots of other ideas too! Please make notes of the vocabulary that your child uses to talk about and describe the shapes that you find and let us know. It’s really useful information that helps us to plan next steps for your child’s learning.
All about shapes
Week 3 – Round, straight, tall… All about shapes!
Thank you to everybody who was able to attend our World Book Day celebrations and for providing some very creative costumes! It was fantastic to see so many people enjoying reading together. The children really enjoy it when you are able to join us in nursery.
This week, children have enjoyed exploring and talking about shapes. We’ve made shape pictures in the maths area, made repeating shape patterns with shape links in the fiddly fingers area and we’ve investigated printing with different shaped objects at the painting table.
What shape is the wheel?
Will it roll?
There was lots of communication, cooperation and problem solving in the Sunshine room on Friday as children worked out how to get the wheels to roll down the ramp without falling off.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve noticed several children have a shared interest in the body and doctors. We’ve had conversations and lots of questions about what’s inside our bodies, we’ve talked about visits to the doctors/hospital and some children enjoyed reading ‘Zog and the Flying Doctors’ for World Book Day. As a result, we’ve decided to follow this interest further and have created a Doctors Surgery in nursery. Providing new role play opportunities is a great way to develop children’s social and communication skills. Doctors role play also helps to encourage empathy between children and it allows them to act out real life situations and be creative!
Week 4 – What are we learning this week?
As the role play area was only created on Friday, we’re sure that this area of nursery will be very busy! We’ll continue to learn about shapes and we’ll go on a shape hunt around school. We’ve also noticed that there are some signs of Spring in our nursery garden (when it’s not covered in snow!) so we’ll begin to talk about Spring time. We’ll continue to practise ‘robot talking’ words and will be learning about the letter letter ‘p’ (as well as the letters – s,a,t,d) in group times.
World Book Day Celebrations
Thank you to everybody who was able to join us this morning for our World Book Day ‘stay and read’ session. It was great to see everyone sharing their favourite stories and to see some super book character costumes!
Can your child talk about their favourite story?
To help us find out even more about your child’s reading at home, you’ll find a sheet in your child’s going home folder that we’d like you to complete. It’s really helpful to find out about your child at home – we often see a different side to them in nursery and we can use your information to help us plan their next steps.
Home Link – World Book Day and Snow
World Book Day – Week beginning 05 March
We’re going to celebrate World Book Day on Monday as we were unable to take part on Thursday 01 March.
- What is your child’s favourite story?
- Who is their favourite character?
Please bring in your favourite stories for us to read at group time (don’t forget to write names in!).
You could also:
- Visit the library or a book shop
- Read your favourite story together
- Draw/paint/collage a picture of the story or a character
- Re-tell the story using props
If you’ve already completed this, we’d love to see some snowy paintings or photographs. Let us know what your child thought of the snow.
Did you talk about freezing/melting? Could they put their own shoes and coat on? Could they fasten the zip themselves?
A chilly week!
We hope that you enjoyed some extra family time this week and had lots of fun in the snow. On Friday, we wrapped up warm and ventured outside to complete a ‘snow hunt checklist’ and, of course, we just had to make a snowman!
As a result of the adverse weather, we’ve rearranged our World Book Day celebrations for Monday 05 March. Unfortunately, some children that were due to be in nursery on Thursday won’t attend on Monday and some children that were going to miss it, will be in nursery! If you haven’t got a costume prepared, don’t worry, children don’t need to dress up. If your child was going to take part, but won’t be in nursery on Monday, they can still wear their costume when they next visit. Please remember to make sure that children can easily play inside and outside whilst wearing their costume and we’d prefer superheroes to stay at home!
Parents and carers are still invited to join us for our ‘Stay and Read’ session from 8.30-9.10 on Monday 05 March. There will be different story-telling activities in nursery for you to take part in with your child including re-telling the story of ‘What the Ladybird Heard’, making gingerbread men in the playdough and mixing porridge for the three bears in our sensory area.
Have you heard about the eggs in nursery? Children (and some parents) are very excited about the eggs that we have in the incubator. For the next three weeks, we’ll be looking after them and we’ll hopefully be able to watch the chicks hatching just before we break up for the Easter holidays. We’ll learn all about the life cycle of a hen over the next few weeks.
On the days that we were at nursery this week, we enjoyed… Building a den frame, transporting objects on a sledge, building a snowman, looking for very long worms and ordering numbers on the whiteboard.
Week 3 – What are we learning this week?
We’re sure that the World Book Day celebrations will provide us with lots of new interests next week – we’ll be watching to see what the children are really excited about and will adapt our nursery provision accordingly. In our maths area, we’ll learn to name and describe basic 2D shapes (circle, triangle, square and rectangle). Children will take part in lots of shape activities over the next few weeks, so you could begin to spot shapes in the environment when you are out and about.
In our group times, children are continuing to listen for the initial sounds in words and some children will be learning to ‘robot talk’ words. This involves them breaking up/segmenting the word into each sound. For example, s-u-n and p-i-g. We’ll use ‘pure sounds’ to do this; if you’d like to listen to the correct pronunciation for each sound, please follow this link to see the Foundation 2 teachers, Mrs Flynn and Miss Eckersley, demonstrating how to pronounce each letter with the corresponding Jolly Phonics action!
An exciting discovery…
Week 1 – An exciting discovery…
We had a very chilly start to the week! Thankfully, the engineers were able to get the parts they needed to fix our boiler as quickly as possible. When we returned to nursery on Wednesday, children made a very exciting discovery in our nursery garden. There appeared to be three egg-like objects that had appeared since Monday. After much discussion, the children decided they were eggs and that we needed to help them to hatch. We talked about what the eggs would need and children found things to keep them warm and safe. After a few days waiting, the eggs finally hatched on Friday (with some keen, small hands to help them!). It was great to see how excited the children were and it provoked many questions… What did dinosaur eggs look like? How big were they? What other animals come from eggs? Are these eggs real? What does extinct mean?
We investigated the shape and size of dinosaur footprints by making ‘fossils’ in salt dough and drawing a life sized footprint of an Aptosaur. To find out just how big it was, we put ALL of our shoes inside it and counted them!
Week 2 – What are we learning this week?
This week, we’ll enjoy reading our favourite stories and we’ll celebrate World Book Day on Thursday. We hope to see lots of parents and carers in the morning to join us for our ‘Stay and Read’ session from 8.30-9.10. There will be different story-telling activities in nursery for you to take part in with your child, including re-telling the story of ‘What the Ladybird Heard’, making gingerbread men in the playdough and mixing porridge for the Three Bears in our sensory area. Please remember children can dress up, but please help us by choosing characters that are not superheroes. As you can imagine, a nursery full of Spidermen and his friends can become quite lively!
We also have some very EGGciting news… We won’t share it with you just yet, but hopefully the children will tell you all about it this week.
In phonics, we are learning to hear the initial sounds in words. Silly Sidney Snake is introducing us to letter sounds using Jolly Phonics songs and actions. We have learnt ‘d‘ for dinosaur and ‘s‘ for Stegosaurus. This week, we’ll be learning about the letter ‘a‘. You can click on each link to hear the Jolly Phonics song and see a picture/video with the action that children will learn to associate with each sound. For example, ‘Sssss’ is a snake slithering through the grass. At this point in nursery, children are learning to hear the sound and may begin to recognise the letter, rather than focussing on how to write the letters.
Home Link – World Book Day
On Thursday, it is World Book Day.
- What is your child’s favourite story?
- Who is their favourite character?
Please bring in your favourite stories for us to read at group time (don’t forget to write names in!).
You could also:
- Visit the library or a book shop
- Read your favourite story together
- Draw/paint/collage a picture of the story or a character
- Re-tell the story using props
If you’d like a few ideas for new books to read, you could visit the World Book Day website.
Look out for our ‘Reading’ information booklet at the Stay and Play or in folders later this week.
Home Link – Holiday adventures
Don’t forget the Home Link activity for this week was to let us know all about your holidays! We look forward to hearing all about your adventures. Please scroll to our previous post if you need any more details.
Welcome back!
Week 1 – What are we learning this week?
Welcome back to nursery. We hope that you all had a relaxing and fun week off and are ready to learn. We’re sure that the next 6 weeks will bring us lots of eggcitement…
We’ll begin our week in nursery continuing with our dinosaur themed learning. Children were really interested in all things to do with dinosaurs before we broke up and when we asked them about their interests and what they’d like to learn about, they were keen to keep our dinosaur enhancements. In the last week of term, Freya brought in some ‘fossils’ of dinosaur footprints that she had made as part of her home link activity; they created lots of discussion about fossils and how they were made and so she is going to help her nursery friends make their own this week. We’ll be looking at the different sizes and shapes of dinosaur footprints. Have you ever wondered how big a T-Rex’s footprint was? We might try and find the answer to this, and any other dinosaur questions that children have, using non-fiction books and the internet.
We’ll be looking for any new interests and fascinations that occur during children’s play this week. Please let us know if your child has suddenly become interested in anything new – jot it down on a post-it note on our interest board.
Before the holidays, we had a few children who were obviously enjoying the cold weather and ‘Frozen’ themed role play. We’ve responded to this with a new small world area in the Sunshine room; we’re sure this will be very popular! You may also have noticed that we’ve had a move around! We’ve expanded our construction area and it now includes a selection of interesting props. Children have already begun to incorporate them into their role play.
Chil
dren began to make their own Valentine’s Day cards in the week before the holidays so we enhanced the writing table with lots of Valentine’s themed craft resources. It was a very busy table and it was great to see so many children writing/mark making!