Nursery

Wow! What an incredible half term of learning we have had in Nursery! Look at all the fantastic things we have been doing. We loved exploring in the forest, practising our balancing, throwing and catching skills in PE, playing and growing plants in the garden and so many more things!

We are so proud of all the achievements in Nursery this term. We have seen a real improvement in the children’s independence skills, as well as developing their knowledge and understanding of phonics, numbers and name writing to name just a few. These are all of the sounds we have learned so far:

We hope you have a lovely restful break with your families, making lots of memories and enjoying some sunshine. Please spend the break from school checking that all of your child’s belongings are labelled, that PE kits and welly boots fit, that your child has a lightweight jacket that they can bring even in the warm weather. It would be a good idea to also start applying sun cream on your child before they come to school as the weather warms up. Your child will also need a sun hat everyday – you can either send one in to stay at school or keep it in your child’s book bag.

Thank you for your continued support this term; we look forward to seeing you all again on Tuesday 22nd April.

Kind regards,

The Nursery Team

This week we have had some beautiful days of sunshine and we have made the most of the opportunity to look for signs of spring!

We talked about what we know about spring and we learned that it is one of the four seasons of the year. It was a good opportunity for us to talk about the past and present, ‘Winter is over, and now it is spring’.

We used our forest session this week to work in small groups and look for signs of spring using a checklist:

We used some binoculars and magnifying glasses to have a really good look up in the trees and on the forest floor to see how many signs of spring we could find. We also used our listening ears really carefully to hear the birds singing in the trees! Some of us worked in a group to have a go at recreating some of the beautiful blossom on the trees that we have seen in our playground.

This week has seen yet another busy week of learning for our children! We have been busy team building in PE, taking turns to complete relay races. We have really enjoyed making the most of the sunshine this week and have spent lots of time learning outside!

Literacy

This week’s book follows on nicely from our learning in Science week last week. We are reading the book Jasper’s  Beanstalk. You can watch it here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23INhyreb8M

We start every day by singing a days of the week song and discussing the weather. This has helped us a lot whilst reading Jasper’s Beanstalk as we were able to join in with the story, remembering which day follows the previous one.
We have been enjoying learning some new vocabulary including  tall, taller, tallest, short, shorter, shortest. We are beginning to get quite good at using these words to describe and compare different items and their height, just like Jasper’s Beanstalk!

Maths

As it links so well to our Literacy book this week, our maths has all been about measuring. We have loved exploring different materials and ways to measure during our explore time.

Phonics

It was lovely to see some of you join us for the phonics workshop this week. Don’t forget there is still time to sign up for next week’s session if you would like to! We have been reviewing the sounds we have learned so far and are very impressed with how well the children are picking them up, as well as being able to recognise them in different places such as in the environment, on display, in their names and even in books!

How you can help at home:

* Practise the sounds we have taught so far: satpinmdgo

* Play phonics based games such as pairs or I Spy

* Practise clapping words and counting the syllables together. For example….. how many claps for your name? How about mummy? Mummy would be broken into two syllables: Mum-my so we would clap twice.

* Continue to practise using the words to describe the position of things. Eg the chair is under the table or teddy is next to rabbit.  Use the words in front of, next to, behind, underneath, on top of. 

As many of you know, we have been very fortunate to have had five ducklings in Nursery over the past two weeks. This has been a fantastic experience for the children as we waited for the eggs to hatch and wondered what would appear out of them – lizards, chicks, birds and dinosaurs were a few suggestions. The daily activities with the ducklings have generated many discussions around how we care for animals. We said goodbye to the ducklings yesterday morning as they were returned to their farm.

As part of our learning while the ducks were with us, we looked at the life cycle of a duck and we focused on the key vocabulary ‘egg’, ‘hatching’, ‘duckling’ and ‘duck’. We also thought about some questions we could ask to find out more about ducks.

This week is Science Week, and as well as learning about the life cycle of a duck, we have also been participating in a whole school investigation to find out about the height of the average child in each year group. We started by using our large building bricks and creating a tower that was the same height as each child. We then counted how many bricks we needed. We found out that we are not all the same height! Some of us are the same height as 13 bricks, some of us are 14 bricks tall and some of us used 15 bricks to build a tower the same height as us!

The grown ups then worked out the average height of the Nursery children and we drew around one of our children who was the same height as 14 bricks. We decorated our figure and cut it out ready for our whole school display!

How you can help at home

• Talk to your child about our ducklings – what key words do they remember? What did they enjoy most about having the ducklings stay in Nursery?
• Our sound this week is ‘g’ – what can they see around them that begins with ‘g’? Can they see the sound written in books that you share with them?
• Can you measure the height of people in your home? Who is the tallest? Who is the shortest?

We have had a very egg-citing week in Nursery! We were very lucky to have some living eggs delivered. We made predictions about what might hatch out of the eggs and some of us were right! We have been keeping a close eye on the eggs all week, being sure to keep them safe and warm. We know that the eggs have to be kept warm in a special incubator until they are ready to fully hatch.

The first duckling hatched on pancake day so we have named them Pancake! We will keep you updated about any further hatchings next week.

This week we also celebrated Shrove Tuesday. We learned that this is an important day before lent starts as the lead up to the Christian festival of Easter. We had enormous fun making our very own pancakes in Nursery and enjoyed eating them too!

St David’s Day

Last Friday, we were very lucky to have a visit from Mr Powell who talked to us about St David’s Day and how it is celebrated. We found out that girls wear traditional Welsh costumes to school and boys wear Welsh rugby shirts. Mr Powell also brought in some daffodils, the Welsh flag and some Welsh cakes to show us.

World Book Day

Today we celebrated World Book day and it was lovely to have so many grown ups sharing books with us!
This morning we went to our first whole school assembly and we sat so sensibly while the teachers read a story to us. It was called ‘Here We Are’ and it is written by Oliver Jeffers. During the day, we have been doing different activities about the book, including puzzles, pictures and water play! We even had a chance to play in our pyjamas on the playground!

How you can help at home:

Have a look at some other books by the author Oliver Jeffers such as How to Catch a Star, Lost and Found or What we Build.  Try to make some predictions about what the story might be about before reading the story and discuss what they liked about the story after you have read the story together.

Welcome back! We hope you had a restful half term break. This week in Nursery has seen us start reading a new book – Rosie’s Walk by Pat Hutchins. The illustrations are beautiful and it has inspired us to have a go at drawing some of our own farm animals!

We have enjoyed learning about some new vocabulary from this book – haycock, mill, beehive as well as practising using some of the positional language from the story, including over, under, through.

We have taken our maths learning out to the forest this week and created some ABAB patterns. The children know this means that it might be red, blue, red, blue or square, circle, square, circle.  In the forest we used natural materials to create new patterns with our friends.

“it’s stick, stone, stick, stone!”             “stick comes next in the pattern”                   “mine is leaf, stick, leaf, stick”

We also learned about different types of plants and know that some grow from seeds, whilst others grow from bulbs. We planted some daffodil bulbs in the school field. We are looking forward to watching them grow!

In between the rain, we enjoyed a fun PE lesson outside this week where we were working on teams to develop our co-ordination, balance and throwing skills! We had a lot of fun travelling in different ways and using apparatus to complete an obstacle course.

Sound of the Week

This week’s sound is ‘m’.  Encourage your child to look for things around the home and outside that begin with ‘m’.  Can they find it written in books that you share with them?

World Book Day

Next Thursday (6th March) is World Book Day. We would be delighted to welcome parents into Nursery to share a book with their child between 8.30 – 9.00am.

How you can help at home:

• Talk about shapes and patterns in the environment
• Create your own patterns with items around your house or garden e.g. fork, spoon, fork, spoon or red car, purple car, red car, purple car.
• Spend some time talking about how the weather is beginning to change and how the trees and plants will be growing and changing

What a busy half term it has been in Nursery!

We began the term by welcoming our new starters and we are so proud of how well they have settled into our Nursery routines and started making new friends.

During the term, we have been accumulating a whole range of new skills and knowledge and the photos below show just a small glimpse of our fantastic learning…

It was lovely to see so many of you at the parents’ meetings this week. It can be a bit rushed at drop off and pick up times, so it was great to have the opportunity to sit and talk to you about the fantastic progress that your children are making!

We hope you have a wonderful half term and we look forward to seeing you again on Monday 24th February.

Over the past few weeks in Nursery, we have been introducing phonics to the children. Phonics is when we match the sounds of spoken English with individual letters or groups of letters.

The teaching of phonics starts with the sounds s, a, t, p, i, n. These particular sounds are taught first because that combination of letters can create a large number of basic words that, later on, the children will be able to decode, e.g. sat, pin, pan, sit, tap etc.

Each week, we have been focusing on a different sound  and the children have been amazing! So far, we have looked at s, a, t and p. We have been practicing how to read the sounds, how to write them and how to spot them when we are listening to a story.

When we practice writing the sounds, each sound has a particular rhyme to help us remember how to write it.

As well as practicing reading and writing the sounds, we have also been doing activities to help us identify the sound at the start of a word – e.g. sun, ant, pizza, turtle. We are also really good at spotting sounds in the environment too!

The children are really enjoying our phonics sessions and it has been a pleasure to watch their excitement when they are able to spot the different sounds in our learning environment. Each week, we will let you know which sound we are teaching the children, so that you are able to support their learning at home.

Ways you can help at home:

• When you are reading with your child, encourage them to spot the sounds s, a, t and p in the words.
• Use the rhymes to help your child to form the letters – this could be on paper, in glitter, in sand etc
• Go out for a walk and encourage your child to look for things starting with each sound.
• Try to make up some sentences where each word starts with one of the sounds, e.g. Tall Tim tickles teddies!
• Click on ‘how to pronounce the sounds’ below to support learning at home – we use pure sounds to help the children blend sounds together at a later stage. Click here: how to pronounce the sounds

This week we LOVED learning about two very special events. We were very lucky to have two special visitors this week who came to talk to us about these events.

Mrs Law came in on Monday to talk to us about Australia Day. She was born in Australia and it was lovely hearing about all things Australia. We really enjoyed listening to Mrs Law share a book with us about some animals that are native to Australia such as kangaroos, koalas, dingoes, wombats and kookaburras. She also told us about the Australian flag – we learned that the stars represent the Southern Cross. We had a lot of fun bouncing around like kangaroos and saying the Australian greeting “G’day, mate!” Mrs Law let us borrow some of her books and even shared a recipe for Anzac biscuits that are eaten in Australia. The recipe is below if you would like to try making them – let us know what you think!

ANZAC recipe card – Australia Day

We also enjoyed watching a video and listening to some traditional Australian didgeridoo music! It looks very hard to play!

Nursery were extra lucky this week to have Miss Ho come in and talk to us all about how her family celebrate the lunar new year. We sometimes call this Chinese New Year. It was lots of fun learning all about the different ways that it is celebrated around the world.  Miss Ho read us a story called ‘Maisy’s Chinese New Year’.  We really enjoyed it because all the things we have learning about for Chinese New Year were mentioned in the story!

We LOVED the Chinese New Year parade music and had a go at creating our own dragons and parade!

We also learned that 2025 is the year of the snake! We enjoyed taking part in lots of colourful craft activities around Chinese New Year, especially the mud writing. We know that red is a lucky colour in China and is often seen around this time of year.

You might like to learn more about Chinese New Year here:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/jojo-and-gran-gran-lunar-new-year

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YA9fwm4s8M

How you can help at home:

• Have a go at some baking – talk about the ingredients and how to measure them. Give us a review of your baking!
• Have a go at some Chinese New Year crafts – you might get some ideas from the links above
• Talk to your child about festivals and celebrations that are important to your family – how do you celebrate? Encourage your child to ask questions. We’d love for you to share these with us on Tapestry!
• Practise number writing, counting and recognition in the environment around you – we have been practising up to 5 so far.

This week in Literacy we have started a new book – Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell. The children have loved immersing themselves in all things zoo and animal! We have learned lots of new skills including predicting and reasoning, remembering why each animal had to be sent back. “The giraffe is too tall!” “The lion is too fierce!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UywEnHKTMXk

We took our Literacy into the hall for PE, where we were learning to use the space and travel in different ways safely. Here we are having immense fun stomping like an elephant, slithering like a snake and hopping like a frog! Can you think of any other ways to travel like an animal? Some of us were really kind and helpful towards our new friends that joined Nursery in January by partnering up and showing them some ideas.

Maths

We have been consolidating our number recognition, as well as counting and representing numbers on our fingers. Some of us are quite creative when we say “show me 3 in a different way”. We really enjoyed playing a sorting game, where we had to put our number in the correct hoop!

Art

On Mondays, we start our week with some mindfulness art activities. This term we are learning about the artist Yayoi Kusama. She is from Japan and loves all things spotty! Have a look at some of the work we have created this week – we are really practising our fine motor skills. We think they look fab! Keep an eye out for more creative things from us soon! You can find out about Yayoi Kusama here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG_8vNTAXbY

How you can help at home:

• Check your child’s belongings are all labelled, including spare clothes, PE kits and wellies
• Talk to your child about the story Dear Zoo – you can watch it here. What is their favourite animal? Can they tell you why?
• Play a game of ‘Where’s the teddy?’ Practise prepositions with your child – the bear is in front of the chair. The monkey is behind the sofa.
• Begin to talk to your child about many and few. Can your child identify the set of toys that has more/many and the set of toys that has fewer?
• Get creative at home! We’d love to see some of your creative skills – you can share them on Tapestry or send them into school in your child’s book bag. You might want to do something spotty, just like Yayoi Kusama!

This week, we have been continuing with our class story, ‘Each Peach Pear Plum’ by Janet and Alan Ahlberg.

The story is beautifully illustrated and has given us many opportunities to talk about some well-known  nursery rhymes and story characters: ‘Cinderella is walking up the stairs’ (Theo).  ‘Little Bo Peep is sitting on the well.’ (Anaya)

During our Exploring Time, we have been doing a range of activities related to the story. One of our favourites has been using the masks and hats and dressing up as some of the characters!

At the end of the story, all the characters meet together and have a picnic. One of our role play activities was to set out a picnic in Nursery. We had to think carefully about making sure we had enough plates, knives and forks for all our friends.

During an art activity, we created paper sandwiches for our picnic. We thought carefully about the shapes and colours that we could use to represent the different picnic foods. We also used apples, pears and carrots to print and we talked about the patterns they made on our paper.

We noticed that a lot of fruit and vegetables appear in the story illustrations and this led to a Maths activity  where we had to find the right number of fruits/vegetables and match them to the right colour!

The Three Bears are some of the characters in Each Peach Pear Plum, and our small world and construction activity was using coloured wooden blocks to create houses for the Three Bears and their friends.

How you can help at home:-

• Encourage your child to talk about what makes a healthy meal – what food should we eat more/less of?
• Ask your child to count out the right number of plates/forks/knives/spoons to help prepare the table for a meal.
• During our phonics sessions this week, we have been looking at the sounds ‘s’ and ‘a’.  Go for a walk around your house or outside and see how many things they can notice starting with these sounds.

Happy New Year to all our families! We hope you enjoyed the festive period and are recharged ready for a new term in Nursery!

We had a very exciting start to the new year with the visit of snow! This prompted much excitement and conversation from all the children. We suited ourselves up and went straight outside for some fun in the snow – we even had to add a new picture to our ‘weather window’ chart! Here we are exploring during our morning exercise.

Later in the week we went to the forest and loved exploring how the snow and weather had changed and affected things in there. We thought it looked very pretty!

Welcome to our new starters. The nursery children have been wonderful at welcoming their new friends and have been taking on the job of being excellent role models very seriously! They have been great at teaching the rules of nursery, reminding everybody how to play in all our areas. We have had a big focus on the golden rules and particularly listening out for good manners – using ‘thank you’.

Phonics

We started our new term with phonics lessons this week. Previously we have been playing listening games and rhyming games but we are now getting ready to start learning the first few sounds we need to help us with our reading! This week we have learned the sound S. We know this is a stretchy sound – ask your children how we say this sound. Can they remember anything that starts with this sound? Can you play a sorting game at home – which items start with S, which ones start with another sound?

How you can help at home:

• Talk to your children about things happening at home or changes in the weather – encourage them to ask questions and speak in full sentences. Repeat their sentence back to them with an extension e.g  child- “It is cold”. Adult – “Yes, it is cold and there is frost on the ground.”
• Bring maths into your everyday routines – counting the stairs, checking the clock  for bed time or dinner time, laying the table
• Read with your child everyday, discussing the story and feelings of the characters
• Check all clothes, hats, gloves, wellies etc are labelled with your child’s name
• Practise listening games such as I hear something that ticks….
• Look for items around your home or on the way to school that link to our sound of the week