The first nursery focus group meetings were held today. They were a great success. Both am and pm parents offered extremely valuable feedback.  They discussed areas of recent nursery development such as snack and developing children’s choice.  They also looked at a new online learning diary which will ‘go live’ to parents too.  All parents present at the meetings expressed enthusiasm for these new online diaries.  The AM parents also discussed some fundraising ideas which we hope to share with you soon.

Please take a moment to read the minutes for the meeting.  These are displayed on the new ‘Nursery Focus Group’ wall display in the nursery corridor.  The highlighted sections are the sections you may find most relevant.  You can also see the ‘Two Stars and a Wish’ feedback that parents gave at the meeting.

Many thanks to all of those parents who gave up their time to attend.  We always find it extremely valuable (and interesting) to recieve feedback.

After the huge success of our newly created music area in nursery many of the children commented that they would like to make their own musical instruments.  They experimented with the different noises they could create using elastic bands and plastic cups or bottles full of different materials.

We made tartan for St Andrew’s Day.  We concentrated hard to push straws through different colours of paper to make a tartan pattern.  It was great for the development of fine motor skills.  These sorts of activities can help us develop more controlled movements for all sorts of small tasks such as buttoning up clothes, holding a pencil, drawing/writing, building etc.

We continue to enjoy exploring a variety of building materials in the construction.  Our models are becoming much more advanced and we are able to talk about our models in great detail.

We are delighted with our new Santa’s Grotto role-play area.  You can see the ideas we had in the big books within the nursery classroom.

We have been enjoying exploring the role Santa and his elves play by dressing up.  Many of us have been choosing to extend our play using writing materials and have been writing our own lists to Santa.  It is wonderful to see the children so eager to write and draw in play contexts.  Please add any ideas you may have for this area to the interactive planning board in nursery.

The drawing table continues to be a very popular area within nursery.  Many children are showing an interest in letters and are becoming increasingly confident in writing their own names.

The children, as I am sure are all aware, were extremely excited to find snow in their gardens last week.  This has prompted a mini science topic on ice.  The children have been experiementing with large blocks of ice, many of which have toys hidden deep within the ice.  The children have been trying out a variety of strategies, mainly smashing, to get the toys out.  They have been using words like ‘melting, freezing, cold’.

You could develop this new interest at home by involving your child in the freezing or defrosting of food,  or  by looking for ice and frost in the garden or on the car.  Please send in any photographs of your child doing this for our ‘Look at me learning at home’ wall.

We have been doing lots of cooking recently.  We made homemade soup last week.  It was delicious.  The children enjoyed becoming involved in the chopping, blending and mixing of the ingredients.

We are hoping to create our own healthy recipe book containing lots of child friendly soup recipes.  Please send in any recipes that your child likes.  We hope to sell the recipe books in the future to raise some additional nursery funds.

We enjoyed baking our no added sugar carrot cake muffins in nursery.  Most children enjoyed the taste of them too.  Please send in any healthy easy to bake recipes that we could try for our snack.

The nursery boys and girls decided they would like to turn the role-play area into Santa’s Grotto. They suggested fantastic ideas of resources that we could use in the grotto. You can see these ideas in our nursery big book. It sits below the nursery planning board. Photos to follow.

The children were involved in decorating the real nursery Christmas tree. Many of them are now desperate to get their tree up at home  – apologies for this! 🙂

They have been working extremely hard to learn the words to all the songs for their Christmas performance  and continue to enjoy exploring musical instruments  in the music area in nursery.

Please remember that the key areas/topics we are focussing in nursery are displayed on the interactive planning board. We are delighted to see that some parents have added some comments to the parent section of the board. Thank you.