COMING UP
| Wednesday 17.02 @1pm | RED + YELLOW GROUPS (Apples) |
| Wednesday 17.02 @2pm | GREEN + PURPLE GROUPS (Bananas) |
Good morning! We are so happy to be able to welcome you back to nursery next week (From Monday 22nd February) and to get to know the many new children and families who have joined our nursery in the last few weeks.
The staff team has been quietly preparing for this return and will do so in earnest for the rest of the week. The purpose of the blog in the next few days will be to help you prepare too. We need to work together to ‘rebuild’ our nursery so Lego (or similar) seems like a fitting recurring theme here.
Many of you have connected with us and with friends during our time apart and we have also encouraged experiences which focus on recognising and managing feelings; be reassured that these will both contribute to a positive transition back to nursery for your child.
Despite our overwhelming optimism about your children’s return, here are a few ideas which should help us all manage time apart from family and returning to nursery – environment, people, play, routines and feelings.
You might want to begin by watching our video from August:
The environment
- Talk about your favourite spaces to play in nursery. The Secret Garden, the Little Garden, the reading corner, the table where you can write and draw…
- Use Lego or other materials to build the whole nursery or your favourite area. Send us a photo as we’d love to see!
- Why don’t you draw or paint a picture of you at nursery?
- Take your adult on a virtual tour of the nursery. Describe what it’s like from when you enter until home time. Where are all the different places you go in your day to play, read, run, climb, eat, wash…?
- Can you guess where I am describing?
- This is where you take off your outdoor clothes and hang them on a peg. You might hang your bag here too. It sometimes gets messy if we forget to hang up our clothes. (CLOAKROOM)
- This is where you can play on the climbing frame, bridge or mud kitchen. We eat snack out here at the tables and benches. (LITTLE GARDEN)
- This is where you go if you need the toilet. You can wash your hands here too. (TOILETS)
- This is where we sometimes get quite muddy. We can find out lots about plants and nature here. We can climb trees and build dens with sticks and branches. (SECRET GARDEN)
Did you guess them all? What other spaces do we play in?
The people
- Recently we invited you to think about yourself and how wonderfully unique you are. That’s where we will start today! Lots of people love you but it’s important that we see how amazing we each are and that we love ourselves too. Draw a picture of yourself in the middle of a piece of paper then use these ideas to talk about yourself. Maybe your adult could write some of them around your self-portrait. This is something you could keep and look at together every so often, especially when you are having a difficult day.
2. Your name is part of what is unique about you. As appropriate, why don’t you find/write/copy/magnetic letter your name? Will you be able to spot your name above your peg in the cloakroom when we go back?
3. In our rainbow nursery we each belong to a colour group. Which group are you in? Why don’t you call someone in your family and tell them about your group? The colour, the children in the group, the adult you usually talk to, the things you do at group time….
4. Why don’t you go on a treasure hunt around the house and find as many things as you can with your group colour? Collect them all together and estimate how many you found before you count them. Did you find 5? 10? 20?! Well done! Remember to return them to where they came from.
5. Think about your group or the other friends you like to play with in nursery. Engage in some role play using puppets, dolls or other figures. What will they get up to at nursery? Are they being kind to one another? Do they let others join in with their play? What are they doing? Are they playing inside or outside?
6. When we go back to nursery parents and grandparents can’t stay with you but there are lots of other adults to support your play and learning and look after you. Try to think about who they are. Most of them appear in the video at the start of this post. To help you remember who is there for you why don’t you try this?
Draw around your hand then write your own name in the space created by your thumb. Cat about adults who laugh and play with you and care for you in nursery. As you name one, write their name in one of your fingers. If you name one adult in each finger that will be at least four people who are excited to play and talk with you next week 😊
7. Can you make a nursery friend or adult using Lego, playdough or other materials? I’m sure they would love to see your model!
We hope this helps you remember a little of what we all love about our nursery. Tomorrow and Friday we will focus on playing with others, routines and feelings.
