This term in the nursery we are learning all about new life and growth. We have been learning the names of and learning facts about baby farm animals.

Today was a exciting day in the nursery. Farmer Amy took time out of her busy day to bring some very lovely visitors to meet us. Amy brought a very special hen. Henny is a surrogate mother. She is a special hen who looks after, and sits on other birds eggs. The mothers are unable to care for their eggs for a range of reasons. This is when Henny takes over. For the last few weeks she has been sitting on 10 duck eggs. They have since hatched into 10 gorgeous ducks, and now Henny cares for them like they were her own. She is a very special hen. Amy told us that the ducks were either Shetland ducks or Indian Runner ducks. We really loved meeting our little visitors and hope they have a happy life with Henny, on Amy’s farm. Thank you Amy.

This week we have been exploring our artistic side. We have mark been making using pipettes. We began by assisting Mrs Hutcheson with choosing colours to paint with. After mixing our powder paint with water we had created 4 colours to use with our pipettes. Mrs Hutcheson placed some paper in the tray and demonstrated how the pipettes worked. Then we were given free range to explore and create. Using the pipettes is developing our fine motor skills as we have to squeeze the tip and our problem solving as we have had to figure out that the paint only fills up when we let go. We have worked together and took turns with the different colours. We have learnt new vocabulary and have lots of fun experimenting with colours and crating fabulous art work.

Today we had some shaving foam in our messy area, we added some numicon tiles to practice our numbers and some of us were using our fingers to write our names in the foam!

We love having a variety of loose parts outside in our garden to explore with. Today we made a castle with a ramp leading to the door of the castle and a gate at the front of the castle to stop anyone accessing it without permission.  Great effort and imagination skills boys!

This week instead of play dough we have had some messy glupe play. We helped fill and pour and mix the water into the cornflour to make the glupe and all chose what colours we wanted to add. It was great messy fun!!

In the 2’s room we are developing our fine motor skills through funky fingers activities. Our current activity is using loom bands and pins. As you can see from the pictures the children have to try and put the band on the pin and can then choose to stretch the band to the next pin or just add some more. Many patterns have been created, including – “I made a house Mrs Hutchen” said Ella-May. The children have shown great concentration skills as the try their hardest to problem solve how to attach the bands to the pins.

Our story and rhyme sessions are up and running again. We were so pleased to have such a large turnout for our first session. The children really enjoy having the opportunity to share a story and show off their singing talents to their parents and carers. The aim of our sessions are to use repetitive stories and rhymes to further develop vocabulary. Our sessions run over 4 weeks with next week already being our third session. If you have not yet managed to attend a session we would love you to come, even if only for half a session. If only just to experience the joy of Ms Connors ‘lycra’ 🙂

Since returning, and before coming off on holiday, we have been talking about Easter and reading stories about the Easter bunny and hunting for Easter eggs. On Easter Monday, after a glorious weekend, we had our own egg hunt. The ladies hid eggs around the school grounds and with number clues along the way we had to use our good looking skills to find them. We were successful in finding them all and at the end of our hunt we were treated to an Easter story and a lovely picnic on the sun.