Tilly’s family enjoyed seeing the photo of her chopping apples in Nursery:
“Aww! Tilly has an apple every night for supper which I chop up for her! Recently she has been putting her new skills to good use and peeling and chopping her own apple (supervised of course!!!!)”
Well done Tilly to use your skills at home too. You are becoming so grown-up and independent. Super skills!
The Nursery kitchens are such busy places with snack and lunch to prepare for every day but some of the children have also been busy making apple crumble recently. Here you can see lots of safe chopping, mashing and use of the microwave to develop the children’s skills as well as their knowledge of what happens to food when it is heated. Their apple crumble looked and smelled delicious and certainly went down well with most.
What better way to learn about shapes than to go out and find some in our own environment? A group from the Rainbow Room went on a shape hunt in the school’s nature area and were excited to find lots of examples of shapes in the real world. They even took the photos themselves and we think that they did a good job as “detective photographers”. Great work finding all these shapes and more. We think that your photos are super and have made them into a display in the Maths area of the Rainbow Room.
Hammers, nails and wood provide great opportunities for the children to develop their skills in Technologies and they show themselves to be great learners whether indoors or out. You can see from these photos that their focus and attention is impressive as they work safely and confidently with the tools. The children are rightly proud that they are carrying out what they consider an adult task and are developing confidence to consider this as a possible area of work in the future.
Lots of our children love developing their Technologies skills and have been learning how to safely use a hammer. They experienced challenge as they had to follow instructions to stay safe, have an awareness of risk and show concentration and perseverance with this tricky activity. Hammering the nails into the wood and then positioning the elastic bands on their work, to form shapes, helped to develop the children’s motor skills. What a great sense of achievement the children have after this activity – it’s no surprise that it’s always very popular.
Learning to follow instructions, such as counting and measuring ingredients, is essential when following a recipe, and therefore baking helps to develop the children’s “Numeracy and Mathematics” and listening skills while prediction, observation and discussion about the potential changes to their ingredients, as they are mixed and baked, develop their learning in “Sciences”. These happy little bakers also learned to use the mixer and set the oven to develop their understanding in “Technologies” so this baking session provided so much learning in one activity. Best of all, of course, is the all important tasting session once the cakes are baked.
STEM stands for science, technologies, engineering and mathematics which are all areas of learning in Nursery. If you take a look at the STEM displays in each room, you can get a taste of all the different activities the children enjoy which are developing their knowledge, understanding, curiosity, creativity and enthusiasm in these areas.
To help you understand how you can support these areas of your child’s learning at home, we have added a link on the right under “Useful Reading: STEM for Parents”. Click on the link for information from Education Scotland and have fun learning with your child.
The children in the Rainbow Room have been very busy investigating an old TV to find out what is inside it and to build confidence using tools. As you can see, this promotes great curiosity, problem solving skills and teamwork which develops learning across the curriculum. I wonder if we have some engineers of the future here?
During the course of last year our weather watching equipment slowly felt the effects of lots of use and was no longer suitable for the children to observe weather changes so we decided to make new equipment ourselves. Here you can see a group in the Rainbow Room garden carefully using the tools to make their own rain gauge. They tested it out with bowls and scoops to make sure that the rain would travel down the tubes and were pleased with their work so we now have a super new rain catcher in the Rainbow Room garden. Why not have a look at their work on your way to or from Nursery?
Baking provides so many opportunities for learning and the children love taking part in it. Apart from turn-taking, sharing, good listening and working as a team, the children can develop their knowledge and skills in several other areas of the curriculum.
Counting and measuring, essential when following a recipe, are “Numeracy and Mathematics” skills while prediction, observation and discussion about the potential changes to their ingredients, as they are mixed and cooked, is an area of “Sciences”. The children are also developing their understanding in “Technologies” as they learn how to use a mixer and the cooker.
Here the children were making chocolate chip cookies and it was wonderful to see their excitement and enthusiasm as they went through the process and then enjoyed tasting what they had produced. Learning can be such fun!
Click then click again on photos to make them bigger.
Glow Blogs uses cookies to enhance your experience on our service. By using this service or closing this message you consent to our use of those cookies. Please read our Cookie Policy.