This week we enjoyed a wonderful visit to the farm. We started off our day by boarding the coach which was very exciting. The children enjoyed looking out of the windows to talk about what they could see during on the journey. Once at the farm, we had the opportunity to meet lots of different farm animals and even saw some brand new baby animals, such as calves, lambs and piglet. Could you help your children to use the names of the baby animals at home by talking to them about the visit? We used our noticing skills as we talked about the features of the animals and did lots of questioning, particularly to the farmers who were cleaning and feeding the animals.

Following our visit to the farm we enjoyed lots of different activities to encourage us to talk about what we saw, including painting farm animals, role playing with baby animal puppets and singing Old McDonald. Take a look at our fabulous pig paintings.
Could you sing Old McDonald at home this week, maybe whilst on a car journey or before bed? Maybe the children could describe their favourite animal to you or even have a go at drawing their favourite animal.

Thank you once again to all of the parents and staff who were able to during support this wonderful trip.

This week in Nursery we have been learning about 2D shapes, matching them to familiar shapes around us, naming them and using our looking eyes to notice features of different shapes. We played a fun game pulling shapes slowly from a magic bag and used our listening skills to predict the name of the shape and match them to objects from around Nursery.

In our outdoor area the children were eager to continue this learning and we went shape hunting. We found lots of different shapes in unexpected places. This led us to go on a shape walk around school. Could you go for a shape walk whilst out and about on day in the holiday? Can the children spot and name any circles, squares, triangles or rectangles in the world around them?

The children’s interests particularly in circles led us to do some shape printing in the style of Kandinsky’s Concentric Circles artwork. We then adapted this to create concentric squares also.

As part of our NELI story for this week, Don’t Wake Up the Tiger, we have been exploring floating. In the story, the animals have to float over the tiger to reach the other side without waking him up. This ignited our curiosity as we became intrigued about objects which float and sink. The children developed planning skills as they suggested filling up a large container with water and found objects to investigate whether they float or sink. We had a wonderful time exploring and questioning which objects float and which ones sink, with many of us explaining to our friends what has happened using the correct vocabulary.

Could you explore this further at home? Maybe you could add toys to the bathtub one evening and explore which ones float and which ones sink. Can your child use the correct word to describe this? We would love to hear about what you discover.

Following these explorations we decided to consider which objects would float through the air. The children loved trying to pop the bubbles as they watched them float across the room and were all eager to be the first to catch the balloon as it floated across their heads.

This week we have been thinking about taking care of the birds in our local area as part of the Big Garden Bird Watch. As we carefully threaded Cheerios onto pipe cleaner for the birds, we developed attention and fine motor skills as well as learning different bird names and parts of their body such as the beak, wings and feathers.

Thank you to all of the families who joined us for our reading cafe today. At ACE we place huge value on reading and sharing books together. It was wonderful to experience this with our families and also share hints and tips on supporting early reading skills at Nursery.

This week, we have been reading the story Goldilocks and The Three Bears. We have used this texts to help us to explore the language of size. We began by matching the bears to their different bowls, chairs and beds before placing them in order from largest to smallest. We also had lots of messy fun in our mud kitchen making porridge and matching the bowls to the correct sized bears before acting out the story with our friends.

The prolonged burst of cold weather last week enabled us to have fun creating some beautiful ice decorations. As we explored we learnt about freezing and melting.

After being stuck inside for most of this week due to the ice, today we enjoyed some fresh air with an outdoor storytime followed by some warm milk for snack.

Today we enjoyed a delicious Christmas dinner with all of the trimmings. Thank you to our kitchen staff for preparing this feast for us to share together.

We are very proud of all of the children this week following their fabulous singing and dancing during our sing a long performances. Thank you to all the families who were able to attend.