The nursery staff will be delivering a short presentation explaining the new online learning journeys in January to parents.  This presentation will only take approximately twenty minutes.  We would like to offer parents the choice of what else they would like a presentation about.

The choices of presentation are:

• Promoting Positive Behaviour
• The Curriculum
• The importance of play – why are they ‘just’ playing?
• Child Development
• Extending learning at home

There is a tick sheet displayed on the nursery whiteboard.  You can either post your ideas on the tick sheet in nursery or by replying to this comment stating which of the above choices you would like to hear more about.   The suggestions were provided by the nursery focus group. Thank you.

The raffle tickets and ‘Guess the Teddy’s name’  will be available this week.  It costs £1 per shot or for a strip of raffle tickets.  Initially ‘Guess the Teddy’s name’ will be limited to just 1 shot per nursery child.  Please bring your money into nursery to purchase any raffle tickets or teddy guesses at drop off or collection.  The raffle will be drawn by nursery staff next week.

Thank you.

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.