Aug - Nov 2022

The Gruffalo

Recently, our literacy focus has been exploring characters in stories. Megan and a group of children built a giant Gruffalo using cardboard boxes and other recycled materials. We discussed how the Gruffalo looks with his knobbly knees, turned out toes and purple prickles all over his back and tried to recreate this in our model.

After building the deep dark wood in our block area, we decided to use various loose part materials to create the snake's log pile house, the owl's treetop house and the fox's den. The children have enjoyed using bricks, corks, logs and more to recreate scenes from the story.

The maidenhill fruit and veg shop

Our latest mathematics focus has been exploring coins and money. The children have been examining and describing different coins and using them to pay for the fruit and vegetables available in the home corner. They even had to use coins to pay for their fruit at snack time.

Integrated into their play, the children have been counting how much money they have, measuring and sorting fruit and vegetables by weight and colour, writing shopping lists, identifying numbers and looking at how much items cost.

These are very useful life skills and something that you could continue at home when doing your shopping. We would be delighted to see these moments from home in your child's learning journal or on Twitter.

Halloween Fun

The children enjoyed role playing as their characters for Halloween, which links nicely to our reading character focus in our literacy learning. We saw so many interesting and fun costumes and characters.

We had a fun filled day exploring with our senses. We scooped and dug out the sludge and seeds from pumpkins, we made spiders with black play dough and hammered nails into a pumpkin in the woodworking area.

Characters

The children in the nursery have been exploring various characters from popular stories and discussing how these characters look.

We can talk about what features a face has and describe our characters that we have made and what they look like.

Some children used junk modelling and loose parts to make monsters with googly eyes, sharp teeth and scraggly, green hair.

THE RECYCLING CENTRE

We are creating a recycling centre where we can store all our loose parts, recycling and other materials to use for a range of experiencs including junk modelling.

If you are able to provide any of the following items, we would be very appreciative.

Loose parts:

• caps

• corks

• buttons

• shells

• conkers

• pine cones

• pebbles

• interesting items like curtain rings etc

Arts and crafts:

• scrap paper

• newspaper/magazines

Junk modelling:

• plastic bottles

• small boxes

Maria will also be building an igloo with the children in our outdoor area and is looking for 2 litre milk bottles, please.

It has been lovely welcoming back the children to the nursery after the summer holidays. They have all grown up so much over the past 7 weeks! We have also welcomed our new children and they have been doing extremely well settling in and getting used to the new environment. The children have had lots of fun exploring all the different areas in the playroom and getting to know all the staff. They have done very well making new friends and we look forward to seeing them progress in their learning journey this year.

The Creative area

Recently the children have shown a keen interest in exploring and investigating through the use of their senses. We have been playing with a wide variety of resources such as sand, shaving foam, paint, pasta and rice.

The discovery area

In this area you can find the children involved in imaginative play with a range of small world props. The children were very quickly drawn to the cars, dinosaurs and farm animals which has helped many of the new children settle into the nursery.

The block area is always a hit where the children have spent time building castles, towers and pirate ships. This has transferred to the junk modelling area where a few children built their own giant pirate ship.

The wood working station has opened and Megan worked with a few children to support them on how to use tools safely and together they built a bird house.

The social area

During snack and lunch time we have been taking part in preparing our food. We have helped Helen, Amera and Sehba to cut up cucumbers and pineapple for our snack, dish up our peas and corn and other foods or pour our own milk and water. We are learning to identify the foods we are having at lunch time, serve ourselves and choose what we like and dislike.

The children are even involved in setting the table and tidying up their plates and cutlery.

The outdoor area

The children have been very busy in the outdoor area - making lemon cupcakes and cookies in the mud kitchen, building palaces and pirate ships with loose parts serving homemade lemonade at their lemonade shop.

Maria, and a few children, even built their own car wash!