There are worms at the bottom of our garden…

March 11, 2022 by Miss Sandison | 0 comments

It’s been very quiet at nursery this week. We hope that everyone is feeling better soon. Those of us who have been able to come have spent lots of time outdoors as signs of spring start to creep into our world.

We have done a lot of walking around our local area to look for signs of spring but on Monday we also had to go on an important trip to the shop to buy milk and snack ingredients. Miss Manson showed us the shopping list and we did a great job matching pictures and matching words to find what we needed. We counted how many pints of milk we needed and explored all of the environmental print we saw. We knew that we needed to pay for our errands too and watched Miss Manson count out the right amount of money.

Even though the weather is still cold, and we need to wrap up to keep warm, we have noticed signs of spring around us. Flowers such as crocuses, daffodils and snow drops have started to appear. We are learning to compare the colours and shapes of the petals and to be gentle to wild flowers. Even though some of us would like to pluck them we know it is best to leave them alone so that the insects and bees can get some early food. It is important for us to learn about the importance of nature and become responsible citizens in real life contexts.

We visited the pond to see if there was any frogspawn and popped into the polytunnel where we noticed little spider webs. We smelled rosemary and collected some to use back in the setting. We learned that it’s ok to take the herbs as they are different from wildflowers. It is important for us to learn about what is safe to eat and what is not. We carefully chopped the rosemary, cooked it gently and sprinkled it into our soup. Over the next few months we are very keen to grow our own herbs, flowers and vegetables.

We had plenty of time for relaxation and fun on our walks. On the windy days we pretended to be birds and aeroplanes as the wind blew us in different directions. Keeping our balance against the wind helps us to develop strong cores and leg muscles and develops our sensory systems. We found some great hills for rolling down! Rolling down hills is good for us as it helps develop our vestibular and proprioceptive systems. We also spent time in the playpark where we could further develop or strength, balance and vestibular systems.

Back inside the nursery grounds we found a worm! We discussed the worm’s length and shape and shared what we knew about worms, “They bide underground”, “they ir wiggly” “feel like grapes” “birds lik to eat dem.” We put the worm into a planter so it could help make the soil nice for our flowers. Miss Stewart wondered if we would like to make a house for worms, called a wormery. We all wanted to do this and worked together collecting leaves, sand and soil. We had time to pretend to be worms ourselves and to sing and dance along to worm songs too! We took turns to pour the sand and soil into the wormery and gently laid dead leaves on top for the worms to eat. We learned that worms love the dark so we wrapped the wormery up and will investigate what has happened next week.

We learned that worms like rain. Our water play this week certainly helped make the ground wet! We spent time filling large buckets and then making waves as we poured the water out. This is great for developing our knowledge of volume, weight and capacity as well as strengthening our back, arms and shoulders. We watched how the water ran down hill and discovered where it made puddles. We experimented with how the water moved around the bucket by putting floating corks on top. We spoke about whirlpools, forces, speed and direction. Some of us wanted to make “hoses” and “drain pipes” using the pipe selection. It was very interesting to watch the water run through the different pipes and to problem solve the best ways to do this. We also used our watering cans to water the flowers and give the (imaginary) bunny rabbit some water.

We have spent some time indoors too, mostly relaxing with number games, painting, mark making and playing together with trains and boats. We chose paint colours independently and spent time building strength in our hands and fingers by squeezing the bottles. A lot of our mark making has been done on the floor this week, a great way to develop shoulder stability to help us become formal writers of the future. We worked together, using our talking and listening skills to share our thoughts and ideas on how to build long and short train tracks and explored different scenarios and stories using the trains in imaginary play.