road safety | Dunrossness Nursery

WOW – how can we be on week 7 already?! Here’s a peerie look at what we’ve been up to the last 2 weeks……

Inspired by the different genres of music we’ve been learning about, we extended our music into learning about our Super Powers – SENSES!. We have been exploring our sense of sight and hearing and loved using these music bells to make our own music as well as copt patterns and rhythms of other music.

We made glasses and played games where we had to use only our eyes or only our ears to play the game. “Winky” was our favourite where we all had to choose someone to wink or blink at and swap places without anyone seeing.

As always we’ve had great fun outside with a mixed bag of weather. We’ve been painting, exploring the forest while being mindful of what we could see and hear each time. We loved the sound of the rustling leaves in the wind and the crunching leaves under our feet. We took leaves back to Nursery and enjoyed, leaf printing, making our family trees and a big thank you tree for Paul, who helped us care for our forest. We even used the leaves to make our Christmas cards!

Our forest gives us great opportunities to talk about Autumn and see the leaves changing. We looked for different animals that might live in our forest and thought about the hedgehogs who may be looking for somewhere to hibernate. We even made our own Autumn tree in the playground.

We’ve enjoyed sunshine at the playpark and rainy days for puddle splashing. We went fishing in the puddles for fish and sea creatures. We made homes and aquariums for each sea creature which developed into a fun “sinking and floating” experiment.

We worked together to make a water fall and use the water to move objects down the pipes and what better way to end the day, than with a water fight!! Lots of fun was had by all.

Lots of fun in the mud kitchen and mark making…..

Mark making……

We’ve been busy learning about road safety on our walks and recreating these in the playground with trips on our “bus”, road works and bikes and scooters, whilst building roads and ramps inside with different materials.

Looking forward to see what next week brings………

We love going to our forest to play. There are so many things to discover in the forest and we find something new to do each time we go. It’s our favourite outdoor classroom!

We hold hands with a partner and practise crossing the carpark safely on our way to the forest.

The boys and girls in Nursery have been particularly interested lately in the signs they have found in the forest. They have been using their sounds and letter skills that they have been learning in Nursery, to try to read the signs and discover what they say.

These barrels and trees make great shelters for animals and creatures in the forest, but they also provide great climbing and balancing fun. Risky play really helps to develop our gross motor skills and allows our children to test and affirm their capabilities, as well as problem solve every day activities.

There are lots of exciting places to explore and hide, but some children have already begun to ponder……

” What will happen when the leaves grow? (Rory)”

“How will we get through the forest? (Owen)”

We found some more signs and worked together to find out what they said. Anri and Maximus wondered why there were no signs to show us how to get to the forest and thought about ideas of what signs we might need and what they would say.

There are lots of amazing things to discover and find in the forest. “What is this? Where did it come from?” Lottie-Mae wanted to take what she had found back to Nursery to look at it a little more closely.

MUD…glorious mud!!!

We were having too much fun to leave the forest so we stopped for a quick picnic snack.

“Look what I found! Is it a pine cone? It’s very small. (Archie)”

Look at us climb!

“I’m the highest! (Johanne).”

“I’m like a monkey. (Anri).”

“I got up! This tree must be very strong. (Lucille)”

Peek-a-boo!

“You have to put your head down low to get through. I nearly got stuck. (Elsie).”

We loooove a muddy puddle….

1….2….3…juuuummmmppp!

“Squelch”……”splat”….”sticky”…

We visited our nature pond to see if the Frog spawn has hatched yet. We hope to take some tadpoles to Nursery to look at more closely and see how they change into frogs.

Who will be first to spot a frog?

We found lots of frog spawn but still no tadpoles….

It’s hard work to walk through long grass and heather. Sometimes we find it tricky and fall over but we are getting better at it and our legs are getting stronger.

Yay – we caught a frog! It was great to take a closer look at the frogs. They look tiny but when the frog was trying to jump out of the bucket, we saw it had really really long back legs.

“That’s so they can jump high” (Maximus).

“I can see another frog!” (Honor)

We also took a closer look at some frog spawn. Some had black dots in the middle but some were beginning to uncurl into tiny tadpoles, getting ready to hatch.

Owen found a tiny caterpillar on the ground. He carefully and kindly picked it up so as everyone cold have a closer look.

We love getting outdoors to play. Even better when the sun is shining!

The bairns are really enjoying building their own obstacle courses. It is fantastic to see them working together to build the obstacles and helping each other as they build their confidence with balancing.