Sarah Laister, Lynsey Heap and Rachael Nelson welcome you to FS1 (Nursery)!

We have more children joining us in Nursery this term and so at the moment we are busy supporting them in their new surroundings and helping them to feel settled. Our older Nursery children are great in helping with this and enjoy the role of responsibility it entails. It is amazing how quickly everyone settles and begins to try new things and make new friends.

Mixing colours

We have explored mixing colours to paint Spring flowers.  We made the colour green using yellow and blue and the colour pink by adding white to the colour red.  

Making Flowers

We have made flowers for our mums for Mother's Day.  We were shown how we could make a flower and then explored this choosing our own colours and resources. 

Garden Centre

We have enjoyed playing in our role-play area set up as a Garden Centre.  

Planting

We have planted a sunflower seed and looked forward to watching them grow.  We have learnt that they for seeds to grow they need soil, light, warmth and water.

PSHE Jigsaw

Our PSHE learning through the Jigsaw programme has been about Being Healthy.  We have learnt about eating healthy foods by looking at two bears packed lunch and identified which bear had the healthier lunch.  We also made a healthy packed lunch. Doing exercise is important to keep fit and we took part in an obstacle course in our garden area.  We know that sleep is important for us and we talked about our bedtime routines and our favourite teddies, we listened to lullaby music which made us feel relaxed and tired.  We learnt about how important it is to keep clean and wash ourselves.  We talked about germs and held hands after touching glitter which showed us how germs can be spread from one person to another.  We washed our hands to clean our hands of the pretend germs while singing a hand washing song.

World Book Day

The children looked amazing in their costumes and we enjoyed having parents join us to share our favourite books.  We visited the school library today and looked at books together.  The children had the opportunity to make their own little books which some did about their family, or their favourite things for example fruits.

Term 4   How I Grow and Change?

We have read the story The Growing story and talked about how we have changed thinking of the things we did as a baby and comparing them to the things we can do now.  We have looked at items of clothing that a baby, a child and an adult might wear and sorted these items according to size.  We used the words small, medium and large. 

The children were keen to hear the story Goldilocks and The Three Bears as they related the language of size to the size of the bears.

We have been on a Spring walk looking for signs of Spring.  We saw shoots popping out of the ground, daffodils, snowdrops, daises and two birds nests in trees.  We listened to the birds singing and a very noisy crow!  When we got back to nursery we drew some of the things we saw on the walk.

India

We have learnt about India and made Rangoli patterns using a range of different media.  We have watched a video clip about the celebration Holi.  As part of this celebration paint is thrown and so we explored splashing paint and blowing it to make patterns.  We have used beautiful shiny numbered elephants 1 to 10 in the maths area and some children have ordered these numbers independently.   We looked at some real artefacts from India, a bag and a pair of beautiful different coloured shoes.  As part of our physical activity we joined in with Bhangra dancing. 

PSHE Jigsaw

Our PSHE learning through the Jigsaw programme has been about Dreams and goals.  We have talked about what we are good at and what we would like to get better at in the future.  Jerry Cat has helped us to learn that if we are struggling with something we pause, take a deep breath, try again and feel proud of ourselves.

Chinese New Year

We have been learning about the celebration Chinese New Year.  We have looked at where China is on a globe and seen how big it is in comparison to England.  We have been listening to the Chinese New Year story finding out how each year is named after an animal that took part in the race.  We know that the rat won the race but he cheated too!  This year is the year of the rabbit.

We learnt that in preparation for the New Year people clean their houses, so we all had a little cloth and helped to clean our nursery as we listened to music (We are the tidy up team).  The children loved this and Mr Rushton joined in the fun too.

The children took part in many different activities for example, building The Great Wall of China with our building bricks, making a Chinese lantern, playing the role play area set up as a Chinese restaurant and colouring and painting dragon pictures.  Red is considered a lucky colour, so we had red water and red playdough to play with.   We have used ribbon sticks to dance with in the school hall and took part in a dragon dance.  We have learnt a new song and played instruments as we sang.  We did our register speaking Chinese  (Ni hao).

Term 3 Were In The World

The children enjoyed the story ‘Space Song Rocket Ride’.  Initially the children were interested in rockets and the planets in the solar system. They enjoyed pretending to fly to space in the rocket in the role-play are, counting back from ten to zero and of course loved ‘Blast Off’.  The children made pictures of the solar system, cutting out the different planets and sticking stars on their paper.  They made stars using playdough and rockets using 2D shapes.  The children have learnt that we live on planet Earth and have tried painting Earth using blue paint to represent water and green paint to represent land.  They know that our country is called England and we have looked at where England is on a globe.

Our learning for Term 1 - We have been looking at the theme Marvellous Maps.  Below are the curriculum guidelines and photos to show what we have been learning.

Archived pages

Below are themes that we have been learning previously. 

Activities to help your child with reading at home

What parents can do:

• Set aside time to enjoy a book together without any distractions.
• Encourage your child to discuss the characters (appearance, behaviour, feelings) in a story, the settings and events.
• Encourage your child to predict possible endings to stories and events.
• Share the ‘reading’ of books and nursery rhymes. (see below for further details)
• Encourage your child to express opinions and to make links between books that you have read together, e.g, regarding author, illustrator, plot, characters. Re-read familiar books developing your child’s confidence. Encourage your child to follow the direction of words with their finger.
• When sharing books take opportunities as they arise to support understanding of vocabulary such as letter, word, sentence, line, page, beginning, end, first, last, middle, title, author, front cover, title page, illustrator, blurb.
• Point out and discuss punctuation e.g. full stop, capital letters, and exclamation marks.
• Model how you take count of punctuation while reading.
• Encourage your child to apply their phonic skills.

The Importance of Nursery Rhymes

• Improve language and communication skills

• Develop reading skills

• Enhance creative writing skills

• Teach maths concepts

• Improve physical development

• Encourage imagination

• Advance social and emotional development

• Learn about different beats and rhythms

• They are fun!

Activities to help your child with writing at home

       What parents can do:

• Support and encourage your child to write their name using the letter formation sheets available in Nursery.
• Encourage your child to hold a pencil in a pincer grip.

• Support and encourage your child to write for lots of different reasons including:

- Birthday cards

• Colouring sheets using pencil crayons.
• Wet paintbrushes (using water only) on outside floors and walls.
• Ribbons and scarves to practice big formation.
• Fingers/sticks in sand/mud.
• Chalking on paper/boards/outside floors and walls.
• Painting – using fingers or brushes.
• Squirty bottles with water in for making shapes on the outside floors and walls.

Activities to help your child with Personal, Social and Emotional development at home

        What parents can do:

• Provide opportunities for your child to play with others.
• Join in with your child’s role play discussing resources and ideas.
• Ensure that rules and routines are consistent and appropriate.
• Encourage sharing.

• Support your child to wait their turn in conversations and games.
• Talk to your child to prepare them for changes.
• Be aware of and support the classroom rules.
• Encourage turn talking through sharing games and stories.
• Support your chid to develop negotiation skills enabling them to solve problems through talk.
• Encourage your child to think about issues from the viewpoint of others.