Nursery

Welcome to Nursery

The staff in nursery are  Louise Wood, Jenny Elia and Alison Rush, Lydia Dennis and Mirisje Kastrati

What we have been doing this term:

For International Day the nursery children flew to Italy. They started the day by watching a video about going to the airport and getting on a plane. The children made their own passports and built a plane using community blocks outside. They then pretended to go on a plane journey to Italy. The activities they then did relating to Italy were: pasta art, pizza art – making their own pizzas using paint and various materials, painting flags, pasta necklaces, photos of famous Italian buildings in the construction area, Italian music playing, Playdough ice-cream and scoops. In the afternoon they watched a Go-Jetters episode about the Leaning Tower of Pisa and they tried to make their own leaning towers. They ended the day with an ice cream party.

In Nursery, new children started in January. They held some play and stay sessions before they started and spent the first few weeks of term settling the new children in. One of their focus texts was ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ There were opportunities for acting out and re-telling the story using puppets and small word scenes, collages to go with each part of the story which they turned into a display that the children could use to re-tell the story, drawing story pictures and big floor maps of the story. We gave the children numbered bear paws and compare bears to give opportunities for counting carefully and matching a set of bears to the correct Numicon. This learning evolved into ‘We’re Going on a Car Hunt’. Lightning McQueen wrote a letter to the nursery explaining that all of the cars had gone missing and the children had to find them! They also focused on the text ‘Shark in the Park’.

There was lots of opportunity for rhyming games, making telescopes and hunting for sharks around the nursery. They researched sharks and watched programmes about sharks, the children drew pictures of their favourite sharks. They then read Shark in the Dark, Shark in the Snow and Shark in the Dark on a Windy Day and compared them. They have just started learning about Peter Rabbit and have watched the story and read the book. The children have been re-telling the story and drawing pictures to go with it. They have been exploring the vegetables that might be in Mr McGregor’s garden. The children have had vegetables in the home corner to cut up and explore and have also been exploring them in soil. They will be making vegetable soup and planting their own vegetables. 

Here’s what we did in the first term:

Nursery began the year with settling in the new children, establishing routines and good relationships, encouraging the children to separate from their adults at the beginning of the session and developing their ability to sit on the carpet in a group. The children joining our Nursery have developing self-care skills and there are those who are not yet toilet trained, so time needs to be spent working with the children on using the toilet. The Nursery joined in with the whole school topic of Dreams of Freedom; talking about what makes them happy and the things they like to do in Nursery. They made a display of our drawings. They focused on the book ‘My Pet Star’, making their own pet stars and talking about how they would look after them and show kindness to them. They then learnt about Space through small world toys and space stories, making rockets using malleable materials to develop fine motor skills.

The focus then shifted to ‘The Family Book’ as a stimulus to talk about and paint family members and make them out of playdough. They have learnt about the events and celebrations that have taken part this half term such as Diwali, Fireworks Night and Halloween. In Phonics, the focus has been on developing auditory discrimination by listening out for sounds in the environment and learning action songs and rhymes. In maths they have been learning to use number names to five and learn that we use numbers for counting.  They have started to watch some of the Number blocks episodes and have started to explore shapes.