All posts by Ms Taylor

Outdoor Learning, Snack, Special Event

☀️Sun days are fun days !☀️

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With our summer term  ending and many of our children getting ready to finish their time with us to move on to school….

What better way to enjoy our last days of nursery and the most likely (but hopefully not) the glorious  sunshine, was to spend today having a fun day having some slippy sunny day sliding on our big water slide!
Using our soapy liquid and our running water hose  we had lots of exciting fun and laughs sliding down our hilly slope.

As you can tell it wasn’t just the children who had all the fun! 😀

We used our bodies in different ways to find the most fun and fastest ways to go down!

The most difficult part was the climb back up the hill to the top; it was well worth it though for those few moments we had laughing all the way down!
Once we were all dried off and changed into dry clothing we cooled off and enjoyed a relaxing snack with an icy treat! 😎

Sunny days are the best!

Expressive Arts, Snack

🍦🍧😎 Cool Fridays 😎🍧🍦

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🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️

After a long hot week we cooled off today with some tasty treats!

We talked together about different ways we cooled ourselves down when the weather was really warm and made us feel really hot!
There were so many great ideas!

“I play water fights”

“I drink lots of water”

“I use sun cream and I wear a hat”

“I eat ice cream and ice poles”

”My favourite is to eat ice lollies”

We all agreed that one of the best ways to cool down was to eat ice cream or ice lollies! This gave us an idea… to make our own ice cream shop where we could sell all sorts of ice creams, ice lollies, milk shakes and ice poles.

We used a selection of craft materials to make our icy treats and our ice cream shop.

We then each took turns to be the shop keeper or be the customer.
Which cool treat would be your favourite?
”I like a strawberry cone and sauce”

”mmmmm mint choc chip is the best”

“I like to lick the ice lollies”

To finish our day we made it real – we had some icy treats at snack time! What a great way to end our hot and busy week, before the rain came! 😎

Hopefully Mr Sun will be back soon! 🌞

🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️

Expressive Arts

3D Sculpting in the Studio

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Today, we have been very busy showing off our creative skills in the Studio. We designed our own fabulous sculptures and combined clay and a variety of different art materials to create them.

We had lots of different materials to choose from such as foam shapes, colourful straws, feathers ,patterned buttons, ribbon and pasta shapes.

First we took some cold, squishy clay to make a base for our sculpture. We moulded it in our hands before carefully positioning and  setting our skewer to begin our creations.

We used good hand eye co-ordination while we were skilfully threading our chosen materials onto our sculptures. We demonstrated excellent fine motor skills, especially when it was a little bit tricky getting those buttons through the skewers!

”I like the feathers it makes it look pretty”

”I’m making mine all blue”

“I can put three bits of pasta together to make it taller”

”I think the buttons are a bit  tricky ”

We loved showing off our our final products and displayed them proudly in the studio.

Can you create some 3D sculptures at home ? You could try sculpting some creative art using junk from any recycling materials you may have.

 

Expressive Arts, Literacy

Let us entertain you!

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We have had a busy day in our Studio. We have explored our creativity and imagination through art and storytelling.
Using a selection of junk and art materials we  were able to build our own puppet theatre.


We shared and discussed what our favourite fairy tale stories were and who our favourite characters from popular stories were. We then listened to some stories before creating our own puppets. Using our great craft and motor skills when glueing, sticking, cutting and drawing  we made our very own puppets all ready for the premier of our puppet show performances.


“ I’m making a fairy for my story”

” Sleeping beauty is my favourite so I’m making Aurora “

Once our audience settled, we began our performances! We sat very patiently and demonstrated good listening skills while we all had a turn of being the puppeteer. For some stories we needed some  help from a friend to puppeteer alongside us as it got a bit tricky trying to hold all the characters at once!
We used our loud speaking voices to introduce our characters and the name of our stories we would be re-enacting. Some of us were a little shy and nervous to begin but when it came to our turn our confidence shone and we were able to re-tell familiar and popular stories using our own words such as ‘The Three Bears’, ‘Goldilocks’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Some of us were able to make our own stories up using our puppets we created.

Well done boys and girls you have been great entertainers! We all enjoyed listening and watching your stories and had so much fun with our puppet theatre, why not give this a go at home? You could make up your own puppets and stories!

Expressive Arts

Paper plate creations!

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Today in the Studio we explored our creativity skills.
We decided to use our imagination to transform paper plates into some wonderful colourful creations!

Our journey began when we thought of what we wanted to make- e.g  our favourite animal,  a tv character, a flower.

 

We had a great selection of different resources to choose from to make our creations such as types of paper, pens , pencils and lots of different colours.

We exercised our fine motor skills whilst strengthening our muscles as we cut paper carefully with scissors, used glue pots and glue sticks and stuck them down to our plates.

The children all had some fantastic individual ideas they brought to the Studio. We loved discussing what each other made their plate into and were able to describe and talk about what we did.

”I’m putting lots of spots on my ladybird”

“ I need a snorty nose on mine”

”Minions are my favourite , they are funny”

The children used good hand eye co ordination when using their cutting and sticking skills.

They  children worked  well together. They  understood and displayed good turn taking skills  and were able to demonstrate awareness of others needs.

“This is a bit tricky can you hold this for me ?”

”could someone pass me scissors?

Why not get creating at home – do you have any paper plates ? What ideas or wonderful creations can you make ? We’ d love you to share your creations with us.

 

 

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What is a scientist?

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Today we have been learning about and  discussing scientists.

In our science area  during a group discussion we used a mind map to  record what we already know  and knowledge we could share with each other.

Here are some or our thoughts……

“ A scientist looks at things with a magnifying glass “

”They make explosions ”

”They investigate things”

We looked at things  as scientist might wear and why. Some of us tried dressing up as one.

“They wear coats so they don’t get messy from mixtures and gloves and goggles to keep their hands and eyes safe”.

We  looked at some of the equipment that a scientist might use with their experiments. We looked at magnifying glasses and microscopes and we learned that they help to make things bigger and  easier to look at. At first we found it a little bit tricky as we has to focus the lens but we soon got the hang of it and had fun exploring and looking more  closely in our Discovery area.

 

We took time to look at and read through a popular book we have in nursery. It is called ‘Ada Twist Scientist’. This book tells the story of a girl who has lots of questions and always wonders how things work and why. We watched her story on our Promethium board to help tell us more about how  Ada  the scientist  investigates things.

Do you have questions about how things work? Or what new things can you discover together at home?

 

 

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Our super scientists investigate volcanoes!

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🌋     🌋    🌋    🌋    🌋   🌋

Today in our Discovery room we were learning about volcanoes and how they erupt. We looked at pictures of volcanoes erupting in some of our books we have in the science area. To investigate more and gather more information we watched some videos of live volcanoes on our promethean board. We were amazed at how the lava could  shoot out the top and then flow all the way down to the bottom.

“It looks like a fire river”

“Wow! It explodes like fireworks!”

We learned some fascinating facts during our learning.

We now know that volcanoes can be active,dormant or extinct.

The liquid inside a volcano is called magma but when the volcano erupts the liquid becomes lava.

🔥🔥🔥🔥Lava is very , very hot!🔥🔥🔥🔥

We thought it would be a great idea to make our very own erupting volcano. We used chose some art materials such as paper, paint and glue to create our volcano and even added some dinosaurs to make them run from the lava!

Now it was time for us to become Super Scientists!👩‍🔬🧑🏽‍🔬
We put on our safety goggles and gloves and some children thought it would be safer to put on some pretend ‘lava boots’ so our feet wouldn’t burn!

We listened carefully to our instructions as we had to measure out our science ingredients- 5 tablespoons of bicarbonate of soda
1 tablespoon of easing up liquid
1 cup of vinegar
Some red food colouring ( to show the lava is hot!)

 

We added the washing up liquid to the  bicarbonate of soda and added the colouring then gave them a good mix together.
Now  for the fun part! We sat back when it was time to add our vinegar and watched our volcano erupt!

 

Why don’t you look out some lava boots and goggles and become a super scientist? A fun and easy experiment you can try at home!

🌋   🌋  🌋   🌋   🌋   🌋

 

 

 

 

Literacy

Fishing for numbers!

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Today in the discovery room we looked at some interesting books about under the sea and the fish we can find there. This led us to share some wonderful stories about fishing trips we have been on and how to catch a fish.  🎣

We thought it would be a fun idea to bring fishing into our nursery room. We decided to collect some items together such as paper to make our own fish, sticks for rods and after some problem solving, we found that using paper clips and magnets would be helpful for us to catch our fish!  🎣

To show how we can recognise numbers and can sort them into order, we numbered our fish 1 -10. This made it a little bit trickier for us to catch, especially when we had a fun fishing race to see who could catch all their fish first!

We demonstrated good hand eye co ordination and used our motor skills when guiding our magnets on our rods to catch our fish. We also had to be very patient!

Our ‘fishing trip’ gave us lots of opportunities to sing a popular rhyme….

🐟 🐟 🐟 🐟 🐟

1,2,3,4,5,

Once I caught a fish alive!

6,7,8,9,10,

Then I let it go again,

Why did you let it go?

Because it bit my finger so!

Which finger did it bite ?

This little finger on my right!

🐟 🐟 🐟 🐟 🐟

Why not try fishing for numbers at home?  You could try catching some different under the sea creatures! 🦑🐠🦀🐋🦞🐳🦐🦈🐡

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Magic Magnets

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Today in the discovery room we looked at magnets and how they work.

We decided to select different items we found around our playroom and investigated to see if they were magnetic using a selection of different sized magnets.

We used our mathematical skills to discover that magnets can pull together objects or push them away. We also found that although we had two of the same item, only one was magnetic. This is because objects that look the same are not always made of the same material.

We recorded our findings on a chart. It showed us what items were magnetic and those that were non-magnetic. We discovered that magnetic things were made of metal but items that were made of wood or plastic were not magnetic, unless they had a little bit of metal in them!

We loved listening to each other making our predictions whether something was magnetic or not, everybody made sure they were taking turns when choosing what items to test. We loved guessing the material!

Why don’t you have a look around the house and guess what materials are magnetic or not!

Expressive Arts, Special Event

Making Christmas memories

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Today in the home room the children have been busy making their very own Christmas tree ornaments  using salt dough and their own creative skills!

We demonstrated good social skills by working together to carefully measuring the ingredients and adding them to a bowl to mix.

We exercised our manipulative and fine motor skills  and we strengthened our muscles through lots of mixing, kneading, rolling and cutting our dough.

We listened carefully and demonstrated we are very careful when using an oven as it can get very hot! We baked our dough  shapes in the oven to make them hard.

We decorated our decorations with our own choice of coloured paint, glitter and snow dust. We then tied some beautiful ribbon to them so we can hang them on our tree,