Autumn 2022

The highlight of our week was the snow. The children were really excited and some of them were very eager to go outside and play in it. They made footprints in the snow and worked together to make a snowman. Rolling a snowball and watching it get bigger was great fun. 

The children have been showing lots of interest in robots over the last week, so this week we have been thinking about how the robots work and learning the difference between technology that uses mains electricity and those that use batteries. We have also been making our own representations of robots using junk modelling and painting pictures on foil..

We are getting excited about Christmas and worked together to decorate our Christmas tree. We made baubles at home with our families to hang on our tree. It looks great.! We have also been busy making paper chains to decorate our role play area. We even made a sleigh for Santa to deliver all the presents.

We finished the week by learning what happens to chocolate when it gets warm. We cut up pieces of fruit and dipped it into the melted chocolate. Delicious!

Our theme this week has been nocturnal animals. We watched some video of nocturnal animals and have learnt the names of some of the animals that are awake at night. Each day we have focused on a different animal and made representations using differnt materials and techniques. We painted hedgehogs and added straws for the spines and rolled marbles in paint to create marble printed bats. Our foxes, owls and badgers were made using collage materials.

During free play we have been doing lots of mark making. We have been making pictures and revisiting our We're going on a bear hunt ' story making our own settings for us to retell the story. After our music lesson the children decided to have a marching band and marched around the nursery playing their instruments.

This week we have been learning about day and night. We started the week by thinking about the things we do during the day and during the night and collaged representations of the sun and the moon. We also looked at the earth and thought about how we get night and day. The children made their own earth for us to use in our night and day experiment. The children shone a torch on one side of their earth to represent day and then rotated it to show how the sun then shines on the other side making day and night.

During free play we have been exploring light by adding coloured paddles to the torches and we have been ordering numbers 1-9. Some of us worked together to build a fantastic castle with the blocks. 

We began the week with Odd Socks Day. The children have been learning how we are all unique and different but have great fun learning together. We continued this theme in our Jigsaw lesson by thinking about how people feel if we use unkind words to them. Our puppet was very unkind, but the children were able to tell him how he could change his behaviour and make his friend feel happy again.  

We have continued our work around 'We're going on a bear hunt' by using our senses to explore different textures. We had to help the bears escape from the ice, retold the story by going on a texture walk and made our own muddy footprints with paint. 

During free play we practised our positional language by using the remote control cars to go under, in, on, and through different places and we made patterns with the geoboards using elastic bands. Role play was also very popular with our princesses inside and our doctor's reception outside.

This week we have beeen reading the story 'We're going on a bear hunt by Michael Rosen. We began the week by looking at differnt kinds of bears and learning about where they live and what they eat. We chose a bear to copy and made our masks using the correct colours.

We have also been looking at the various settings in the story. We have been developing our fine motor skills by cutting out our ' long wavy grass' and have used our creative skills to sponge print our cave. 

This term our unit is called ‘Is it shiny?’ We began our new term learning about the celebrations of Halloween and Bonfire night. We looked at different types of pumpkins and used the seeds to develop our fine motor skills by picking them up with tweezers to fill our pots. We also made our own pumpkin faces on the creative table.

'Halloween is finished, now we are learning about fireworks'   

We looked at some video of fireworks and talked about the sounds we could hear and the colours we could see. We learnt a song about fireworks which we added actions to. We have been exploring different techniques to create representations of fireworks and using rocket pictures to count and match to numerals. 

The damp weather has not stopped us from enjoying the outside. We have been paddling in the puddles, and learning about forces by rolling our balls down chutes of different heights.

Cooking has also been one of the children's interests this week.We have been making ice cream in the sand tray, chocolate cake in the mud kitchen and we finished the week by making crackers and cream cheese.  

The term has flown by and we have finished it by learning about the Hindu festival of Diwali. We read the story of Rama and Sita and acted it out using puppets. We practiced our cutting skills by cutting out diva lamps and sticking them onto black paper. We made rangoli patterns using shapes and lanterns to celebrate the Festival of Light.

We have also been making our own diva lamps. First we made our own salt dough. Then we moulded into the shape of a diva lamp and cooked the salt dough. Once they were hard we painted and decorated them and finally we added our candles. 

In Nursery this week we have been reading the story 'The Colour Monster' by Anna Llenas and learning how to recognise and deal with different emotions. By the end of the week the children were very confident in saying how they were feeling and what made them feel that way.

Our focus this week was 2D shapes. Maisy Mouse bought her bag of shapes to school and we played different games to help us recognise  and name the shapes. We had great fun driving our cars around shape roads and also drew around 2D shapes. 

In Nursery this week we have been learning about our families. We have brought in our own family pictures to share with our friends and learnt about many different types of families. We have also made our own representations of them. 

The children have shown lots of interest in the musical instruments and have been exploring the sounds they make and using them to accompany their singing. We also used everyday objects, such as bowls and spoonsto make our own musical instruments. 

This week we have been learning about our bodies. We have been learning to name parts of the body by singing songs including body parts such as Head, shoulders knees and toes. We have made representations of our faces by looking in a mirror and then selecting materials to represent our features. We have also thought about the inside of our bodies and have read the story Funny bones by Alan Ahlberg. We made our own skeleton pictures.  

We have also been learning about patterns on the maths table. Some of us are very good at making repeating patterns. 

During free play we have had great fun exploring the texture of shaving foam and outside we worked with the reception children to make some fantastic houses for us to play in. We have also been learning to recognise and write our names by collaging our initial letters and writing our names when we come into nursery with our parents. 

We are very excited to welcome the children back in to our newly decorated nursery provision. When asked if they liked their new nursery one child replied 'its beautiful'. 

 This term we will be learning about ourselves. We will learn about our bodies, different types of families, how to be good friends and how to try our best with your activities. We have spent the first week getting to know each other and welcoming in the new children who are joining us this year.

The children have also been very interested in the sad news about the Queen. They looked at photographs and coloured their own pictures pictures of the Queen. One child said ' The Queen died. She went on an aeroplane', another said ' the Queen is in the sky. She lived in London' demonstrating their knowledge of the world around them.