Successful Learners – Page 48 – Hecklegirth Nursery

Bye Bye Butterflies

After following the progress of our caterpillars which grew and formed their cocoons, we finally saw our beautiful butterflies emerging in their nets last week. After feeding them on sugary water and slices of oranges, it seemed that they were ready to fly off and on Thursday we found a quiet spot to release them near the nature area at the front of the school. Although they did not seem keen to leave us, Miss Kerr gave them a helping hand to settle on the flowers which gave everyone a chance to have a close look at our little butterflies before we waved them goodbye.
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Rainbow Room Story Time

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.

Granny Went To Market

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.

Floating and Sinking

The children have been taking lots of their learning outdoors in the recent warm weather and we captured some photos last week of a group investigating floating and sinking. There was lots of discussion about exactly what was happening and why some objects “stayed on the top” and some “went down to the bottom”. What better way to learn than with big bowls of water in the sunshine?
Let’s hope that this wonderful weather continues as one of the current areas of interest is searching for minibeasts in the garden.

Cocoons

Our little caterpillars have been so busy munching away on their food, carefully watched by the excited Nursery boys and girls, that they are now at the stage of cocoons. Today they were transferred to their nets and we hope that beautiful butterflies will emerge in a week or two. If you ask the children, they will be able to show you the cocoons and tell you all about them.

An Exciting Parcel

An exciting little parcel arrived in Nursery last week which caused everyone to stop and look carefully. It was our own little tub of caterpillars to help our learning about life cycles. The children are keeping a close eye on them and already they have grown considerably. Why not ask the children to show you them in Nursery and see if they can tell you what is going to happen next to our caterpillars?

Baby Talk

One of the Health and Wellbeing learning outcomes at Early Level is to show an awareness of the tasks required to look after a baby so we thought that there could be no better way to find out about this than to invite Miss Awde in to Nursery with her beautiful little baby. The morning children had lots of good questions for Miss Awde as they thought about the differences between themselves and a baby.
Miss Awde and Devon are coming back in this week to visit the afternoon children so they will be able to ask any questions they may have then. Thank you Devon for being a super visitor and for bringing your Mummy with you. We are looking forward to seeing you again soon.

Seed Planting

After learning a little about Vincent Van Gogh, the children have been planting sunflowers as well as painting them. We have talked about what they will need to do to make their seed grow and about the different parts of a plant so hopefully the children should be able to look after them when they bring their sunflowers home soon. We look forward to hearing about some super sunflowers or even seeing a photo once they begin to grow. Fingers crossed that they can be planted outdoors and turn into a lovely burst of sunshine in a corner of everyone’s garden.