Here are some of the children and their families at last week’s PEEP session which was all about numbers. As part of the session they played a numbers action game. There was lots of winking, blinking, clapping and hopping. Eileen told me that turning around six times made Alyssa dizzy!! It certainly sounds like a lot of fun.
As we are talking about minibeasts and lifecycles in Nursery, the children have been taking the opportunity to learn about symmetry in the patterns and colours of butterflies. They have used different ideas to create their butterflies which have provided variety for our colourful display.
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Some photos from a while back of a group of children on a shopping expedition show them off to the town to buy brushes and varnish to prepare the tree trunk seating in the garden. As you can see, they showed independence skills as they found what they needed in the shop and paid for them. Thank you for being so helpful boys and girls – you were super shoppers.
On a recent visit to discuss our outdoor environment, the local ranger brought us a great new base for making a fire and the afternoon boys and girls were the first to try it out. While some were intrigued to watch the ranger setting up the fire, others were busy indoors making bread. Lots of measuring and counting skills were needed to make sure we followed the recipe but, as you can see, our team of chefs showed super concentration to produce their dough. Once it was wound round sticks and the fire was ready, the children helped to cook their bread and they melted marshmallows on sticks which brought lots of discussion about the changes happening to them as they were cooked.
We were very impressed with the children’s super listening skills and discussion about staying safe near fire. They certainly deserved to taste the results of their hard work. Thank you very much to Duncan for his help- the children had a great learning experience.
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There was lots of learning happening recently when the children helped to make play dough. They were learning the importance of reading a recipe so that they know how much of each ingredient to use – there was good number recognition by some for this part of the task. Then they took turns to help count the number of spoons of each ingredient as they put it into the bowl and there was careful measuring to make sure we had just the right amount of water. As you can see, there was lots of super concentration and it was no surprise that the play dough turned out well. It’s true what they say that some things seem better when you make them yourselves and this play dough was certainly very popular so well done to the counters and mixers.
Two of our families have left comments on our recent posts. Enid’s family liked our first graph:
“What a fun way to learn about graphs, fantastic idea.”
We wanted to make sure that everyone had a chance to give their opinion on the plants we chose and the children were able to see clearly from the graph which choices were most popular so hopefully their first experience of a graph was meaningful for them.
Vinnie seems to be really proud of his recent certificate:
“Vinnie was so happy with his reward he showed it to everyone who came to the house…..even the milk man!”
We love that story Vinnie. I hope the milkman was as impressed as we are with your achievement.
Once we had the planter decorated by our keen painters, we had to decide which type of plants we wanted for our garden. We talked about different scents and colours to help us make our decisions. Some thought a lavender plant would smell nice while others preferred mint or orange and lemon. To make it fair we all voted for which type of plants we would like in our new planter. Everyone contributed to our graph and we learned how to work out the winner from looking at the height of the columns. Super work boys and girls! If you would like to see their graph we have put it on the entrance door to Nursery.
As promised, here are photos of the children from the Rainbow Room enjoying taking part in our “Share a Story Month” activity. They too had fun searching for all the objects that Granny bought in the story “Granny Went To Market” and enjoyed the bells and drums as much as the children in the Sunshine Room did. Thank you to Eileen, our Family Learning Co-ordinator, for organising this lovely activity and to those parents who were able to join us.
To celebrate “Share a Story Month” we recently held a family learning event where we had great fun telling the story of “Granny Went To Market”, with the children developing their learning across several areas of the curriculum.
All the children took part in the story telling which involved finding a number on the globe to show us the different countries Granny visited and then finding the items from the story hidden in the Nursery. As you can see, the children particularly loved experimenting with the bells and drums that they found, making little bands once the story was finished. We hope that those parents who joined us enjoyed this celebration of storytelling as much as we did. Here are some photos of the children in the Sunshine Room taking part. We will post photos of the Rainbow Room soon.
There is no better way to learn about the signs of winter than to be outdoors on a frosty day which is exactly what the weather brought us this week. The effects of a frosty night brought excitement and great opportunities for the children to learn about winter weather. Hard, frozen ground and puddles of ice became exciting resources to experiment with and the children had lots of discussion about how it felt and what would happen if they took it inside. Cayne said, “If you stamp it, it crunches but it goes to water inside”.
We had a super team of investigators trying to work out why the digging area had become so hard and various tools were used to try to break it up. Ben said, “If you drag ice, it breaks a bit” and there was a lot of discussion about whether the digging area would stay like this forever because the sun was out but the ice was not melting.
Instead of our mud kitchen, the children decided that they would have an ice kitchen and they set about making soup and ‘hot stuff’ because they thought it would warm us up. There was certainly a lot of cooking going on and we had helpers in all corners of the garden searching for pieces of ice to break up for ingredients. James said, “You can saw ice off a puddle to make it better”.
We counted how many pieces of ice we had in a pan and discussed the different sizes and shapes of them – some children noticed that we couldn’t find a circular piece of ice which caused some great discussion. We even found a few frozen numbers and tried to find others. Well done all you super thinkers who were outdoors this week – you helped each other to learn about the effects of winter.
