During the month of October we have had the opportunity to practise our numeracy skills during group time and within our play throughout the nursery. We have been playing in the playdough with the buttons and Numicon to create patterns and practise our counting. There has been the chance for children to participate in various games, which have had a focus on numeracy but this also required the children to use their turn taking skills.

At group time we were using the Geoboards and elastic bands to create shapes. Mrs Reynolds had shape flashcards which she was holding up for the children to recognise and then encouraging them to create the shape on their board.

The coloured bears have been a favourite resource for sorting colour, counting and ordering in size.

Outdoors we have noticed the leaves changing colour and falling from the trees.  We decided to make a collaborative piece of art using autumn colours.  The children had fun painting and printing.

Some of the children were interested in fire and lava.  They helped create a papier mache volcano and  experimented with ingredients to make the volcano erupt.  We added leaves and dinosaurs to create a dinosaur land.  The children enjoyed engaging in imaginary small world play.  They added water to one of the trays to make a pool for the dinosaurs and enjoyed guessing which dinosaurs would float and which would sink.  They also enjoyed sorting the dinosaurs by colour, size and type.

During the last week of October we have been celebrating Hallowe’en and all things spooky and gloopy.  We have been rolling pumpkins down guttering filled with paint to see what we could create on paper. Apple printing was a huge hit. We noticed that  when the apple is cut in half and printed it looks like a pumpkin.

We have been practising counting our spooky ghosts.  Some of them hid and we had to guess which ones were missing!

Happy Hallowe’en!!

We had a visit from one of our dads who is a police officer.  He told us all about his job and how he helps to keep people safe.  The children got to handle some of his equipment and most exciting of all… got to see inside his police van!