OakburnEYC
This week the children went on a nature walk to look for bugs, leaves, branches and other wildlife we could see. We collected lots of branches and leaves for our own bug hunt where we used tweezers to lift the leaves to reveal any mini beasts which lay underneath.
This week in the Acorn room the children enjoyed using our arts and crafts area where they made pasta pictures and painting using bubble wrap, rollers and paint. The children enjoyed gluing and sticking with the pasta to create different pattern.
This week we also had play dough which the children enjoyed using our play dough tools to roll, stamp and cut up the play dough helping to develop their fine motor skills.
The children ‘Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs’ story to develop their number skills. The enjoyed putting the dinosaurs into the different sized buckets and counting how many could fit into them. We also used to felt numbers to encourage number recognition.
Today was our mudslide day during our nature week. We have been exploring the great outdoors within our centre grounds. Our children have been turn taking, taking on leadership, being responsible, included, problem solved and developed new friendships.
We believe that outdoors has fabulous benefits to children and their health and social skills. It Is an environment where children feel free and independent. Our staff are enjoying this too !!
Here is a great article to read regarding the benefits of outdoor play. https://www.miracle-recreation.com/blog/why-should-my-child-play-outside-benefits-of-outdoor-play-for-kids/?lang=can
This week out caterpillars have changed quite a lot. We now have cocoons. The children are developing their understanding of life cycles and we have been looking at our new books that have been delivered. We have then discussed what comes first and sorting the life cycle sequence.
We have written some of the words that associated with our current interest.
Children have also started to explore the butterfly and we looked at the wings of the butterfly, one child noticed that “both sides are the same”.
“Sports week” Set up an assault course in the garden for the children to take part in 😎🏃🏼🏃🏽♀️🚴🏼🚴♀️ The children developed their coordination, balancing, gross motor skills, turn taking and building trusting friendships. 
This week we have been learning about the life cycle of our caterpillars, they arrived last week and we have been watching them grow everyday, the children have been relating what they are observing to the “Hungry Caterpillar” story, children are beginning to show an understanding of the caterpillar turning into a cacoon and then into a butterfly.
Whilst we watch the caterpillars grow we are adding in some numeracy to our learning through out caterpillar games, children have been using this to develop their understanding of sequencing numbers 0-5 or 0-10 and backwards to add challenge.
At the beginning of the week we were using our fine motor skills to hook the magnetic fish, the children really enjoyed this – “look Pamela I got a blue one!” 🐠
We were exploring water properties later this week in the water tray by freezing water into ice then seeing what we could do to help melt it. We found that placing our hands on it was too cold 🥶 but we then used more water to pour over it so it would melt quicker. We then used tweezers to pick out the coloured blocks.
This week in the expressive area , it was sports week at Oakburn. The boys and girls made their very own medals 🏅, we used shiney paper and lovely collage stuff to decorate our medals . We also made pictures of our favourites sports ⚽️🏏🏓🎾 pictures we spoke about what sports the boys and girls liked best . We used pencils , crayons and felt tips to create our masterpieces.
Our Little Acorns have had a lovely week.
A few children showed an interest in exploring our farm animals, we followed this interest and provided a farm experience and jigsaws. We showed a few children a short clip of a farm, learning some animals sounds. We danced to Old McDonald and explored our farm animal puppets.
Our little Acorns smiled, laughed and squealed with excitement demonstrating enjoyment as they chose to participate in our sports day. The children had created their own medals and developed a sense of achievement as they received their medals for excellent running.
This week in the discovery area we have shown a great interest in Sea life creatures! GH came into nursery on Monday morning and was sharing with her friends that at the weekend she had been at Deep Sea World where she had seen lots of sharks and fish! She brought a few small sea creatures in to show us. We put them in a tuff tray to explore them further.
The boys and girls agreed together that the sea animals needed blue sea, sand and shells so we added this to our small world along with some stories.
While exploring some of the children took interest in the shape and patterns on the shells so we set up some paint and paper to explore these patterns further.
Later in the week CM asked me “how many legs does a squid have?” So we printed some pictures of different sea creatures and counted how many legs, tentacles and fins they had.
