This week at Nursery, we enjoyed an exciting week of celebrations as we marked our final week of this nursery year together. Some of us are about to begin exciting journeys in Reception and so it was very important to celebrate this special time together. We enjoyed two parties and one fantastic bounce up event this week!

At our parties, we enjoyed sharing the party food we had kindly brought in together. We are so incredibly grateful for all of the kind donations that our Nursery families provided, which created a fantastic feast for the children to enjoy together. Thank you for all of the delicious party food!

We had lots of fun dancing and playing party games too! We stayed very still during musical statues and the winners took home balloons as a prize. We danced to all of our favourite songs with our special friends as we celebrated together.

Look at our wonderful party outfits! We all came dressed for the occasion and posed for many photos with our key workers and friends. Our parties were a wonderful way to celebrate all of the amazing things we have each achieved this year at Nursery.

On Thursday, we enjoyed joining in with the bounce up day at school! We became very colourful as we enjoyed the inflatables and ran through the different coloured paints. Thank you to our grown-ups who were able to join us for the fun!

The Nursery Team would like to say a huge thank you to our children and their families for making this year so wonderful! We are so proud of all of the individual achievements, wow moments and super memories that we have had the joy of being a part of this year. What a wonderful Nursery group we have! Thank you to our families for your continuous support this year. We hope all of our families have a wonderful summer and wish all the best to our children who start school in September – you are all very ready! We look forward to welcoming back our returning children and new friends after the summer!

For our second to last week of the year at Nursery, we enjoyed having two teddy bears’ picnics together! Our plans changed slightly due to the hot weather and we instead had lots of fun having indoor picnics and trying out some teddy bear themed activities with our friends and grown-ups instead. Our special people were invited to come to our picnics if they were able to, thank you to our families who were able to join us.

We started our picnics with some delicious snacks. We enjoyed some teddy bear crisps and an ice pop to help us to keep cool. Our grown-ups joined us for this and enjoyed some snacks too!

It was then time to get busy! Here we are having lots of fun at our morning picnic. We enjoyed creating playdough picnics, feeding porridge to the teddy bears and creating our own 3D teddy bears using crayons and scissors.

In the afternoon, we enjoyed sharing stories, creating small-worlds with bears and using our fine-motor skills to create bear pictures. We again enjoyed sharing a picnic with our grown-ups and trying out different activities!

We would like to say a huge thank-you to our families who were able to join us and make our teddy bears picnics extra special!

This week at Nursery, we had a fantastic time participating in Sports Day! We had spent lots of time learning how to join in with each race and practising to become more confident at each one. We really enjoyed being part of a team in our colour groups and couldn’t wait for the real events when our grown-ups would be joining us! Here we are in our teams, raring to go!

During the event, we each joined in with 4 different races. We had lots of fun participating in the running race, team relay race, the quoit balance race and the firm favourite, the egg and spoon race! To participate, we had to use our gross-motor skills to co-ordinate, travel, balance and change direction. Our adults were very impressed with the skill and speed achieved during the races!

We really enjoyed cheering one another one, shouting for our teams and watching our grown-ups clap for us. It was a fantastic event and a brilliant way to celebrate the end of our Nursery year. Thank you to our grown-ups who joined us and Year 6 helpers who supported us during the races!

This week at Nursery, we enjoyed spending time in the sunshine outdoors. We stopped to notice how the plants and floors in our flower beds were blooming, celebrating our hard work planting and gardening earlier in the year.

For Science Week, we learnt lots of information about bees and why they are so important to our world. We planted a wildflower garden for them to say thank you. Our beautiful wildflower garden is now blooming with lots of beautiful flowers. We spent lots of time noticing bees and ladybirds enjoying our garden. The children have been fascinated by how they move along the flowers and fly between them.

With the help of Ms Bah, we also enjoyed picking some strawberries that have been growing in one of our flower beds. We looked carefully for the red ones, as we learnt that these are ready to eat. We brought them inside to show our friends and taste-tested them too! We said they were juicy and sweet! We then shared them out and all enjoyed a strawberry!

We have all showed care and consideration for our Nursery garden and glowing plants this year. It was lovely to appreciate the beauty in nature together this week!

This week at Nursery, we have been really developing our number sense by focusing on showing numbers on fingers to 5 and counting 5 objects by tapping our finger or moving them to make sure we are accurate. We also begun to match numeral to quantity during play experiences.

We enjoyed working together to complete the number doors jigsaw puzzle this week. We had to match the number of animals to the doors to complete the puzzle. We counted the animals to check that the pieces were in the right place.

We all enjoyed playing with our ACE Ice-creams invitation in our maths area this week. We focused on making ice-cream sundaes containing 5 scoops of ice-cream. This required spooning each ice-cream scoop into the bowl as we counted carefully. We used wooden 5 frames to check our accuracy, as we noticed how the flavour combinations represented different ways to compose 5. We applied our mark-making skills to draw our ice-cream recipes to explore using marks to represent number and 5 frames to show that our sundaes did indeed have 5 scoops as planned. Many of us revisited this activity across the week, showing a great interest in ‘real-life’ problem-solving!

Number rhymes are a fantastic way to deepen our understanding of numbers to 5. We focused on the rhymes 5 speckled frogs and 5 little ducks. We used toys to act out the rhymes, moving them to see how the quantities changed. We enjoyed whole-group singing where we acted out the rhymes ourselves to demonstrate our understanding, using our fingers to represent the numbers too.

Maths is everywhere and we have enjoyed developing our sense of number in so many ways this week at Nursery. You could continue to practise this at home as family by singing number rhymes together, creating a dance routine with 5 of each action (5 claps, 5 jumps, 5 wiggles) or by counting out toys. Look around you when indoors and out, do you notice any numerals to 5?

This week, we enjoyed a wonderful visit to Harlow Carr Gardens with our friends! We travelled on an exciting coach ride and looked out of the windows to notice the world around us. We spotted horses, cows, sheep and even deer on our travels to Harlow Carr. We all had big smiles and were full of excitement for our special trip!

We arrived at Harlow Carr and went on a peaceful walk around the gardens. We looked closely and listened carefully to the beautiful nature around us. We noticed blooming flowers of many different colours and listened to the birds in the trees. There was some rain in the air but we were well prepared with rain coats and wellies!

We spotted a troll by the bridge and lions laying by the stone columns! We wondered if the troll was from the 3 Billy Goats Gruff fairy tale and thought about what the lions might be doing in the middle of the gardens. We were impressed by the tall stone towers and compared them to the towers we enjoy creating at Nursery. We found fallen flower petals on the ground and looked closely at the details on them.

We continued to walk and came across a playground, which we all enjoyed playing on! We enjoyed going into the tree house and sliding down the slide with our friends. Some of us experimented with making music outside with the instruments. We looked at ourselves and our friends through mirrors and windows as we had lots of fun exploring the equipment.

Swinging on the rope swing was our favourite thing to do when exploring the playground! We waited patiently and took turns to swing on the rope. We had lots of fun swinging across to the other side!

We ended our visit with a lovely picnic in the learning garden. We enjoyed sitting with our friends to enjoy our packed lunches together. When we were finished, we walked back through the gardens and got on the coach again. The journey home was rainy but we were excited to spot more farm animals and familiar places that we recognised. We even had a few sleepers on the way back – the sign of a good school trip!

Thank you so much to our family volunteers who joined us on our visit to Harlow Carr Gardens. Your help was invaluable and it was wonderful to have you with us. We hope you enjoyed the visit as much as the children and staff did! What a super day out!

We have had a week filled with colour for our final week of the half-term at Nursery! On Tuesday, we arrived at Nursery in our brightest greens for Wear it Green day as part of our participation in Mental Health Week. Throughout the week, we noticed where we had been kind and shared green heart stickers with our friends when we looked after one another.

On Wednesday, we enjoyed experimenting with lots of different greens as we created collages. We compared the different colours and thought carefully about how they could be arranged on our card, with fantastic results!

This week at Nursery, we also experimented with paint printing to create our own butterfly works of art! We enjoyed exploring how we could add bright paint colours to our paper in lines, dots and shapes. We then folded our paper and pressed it to print, leaving symmetrical butterfly wings!

We hope our Nursery children and their families enjoy the sunshine this weekend. Look out for butterflies and other minibeasts in the world around us!

This week at Nursery, we have been sequencing the lifecycle of a caterpillar as a development to our learning about The Very Hungry Caterpillar story. We spent time looking closely at the butterfly house and talked together about what we noticed. We were all quick to spot the life-cycle stage – a cocoon, just like the hungry caterpillar stayed in once he had eaten all of the food! We learnt that it is also known as a chrysalis. By recalling the story, we were all confident when making our predictions about what might happen next – beautiful butterflies! We all knew that the cocoons were once caterpillars to complete the lifecycle sequence.

We enjoyed joining in with some yoga sequences to tell the lifecycle of a caterpillar. We wiggled and stretched in the tummy time position like caterpillars, curled up small into little cocoons and then practised moving our legs like butterfly wings. We also used yoga poses and movements to retell the hungry caterpillar story, showing great skill in patting both our tummy and head to show when we were hungry!

This half-term, we have been learning the song ‘There’s a tiny caterpillar on a leaf’. The song tells the story of the lifecycle of a caterpillar and has really helped us to sequence the lifecycle for ourselves! We have all enjoyed singing along and joining in with the hand actions, showing great confidence when performing!

You could go on a local walk to see if you can find any other minibeasts in the world around us. We would love to see some photographs on Tapestry!

This week at Nursery, we had a very important job to do! We were asked to create a fruit salad for the very hungry caterpillar! This provided us with lots of starting questions: Which fruits do we enjoy eating? What might the hungry caterpillar like? Which fruits should we include in our fruit salad? We are all really enjoying sharing The Very Hungry Caterpillar story, so to be given such an important task gave us great excitement!

Creating a Fruit Salad Recipe

We decided to begin our journey by creating an ingredients list for a fruit salad recipe. We used our mark-making skills to draw the different types of fruit that we wanted to include in our fruit salad for the hungry caterpillar.

Our younger Nursery friends enjoyed using chunky marker pens and long lengths of paper to create a collaborative fruit salad recipe. The children were encouraged to mark-make on a large scale to fill the paper and lie on their tummies when mark-making. This helps us to develop our core strength, which is a very important part of our physical development. We all worked together to create lines, circles and shapes, carefully considering the colours we might need for the different fruits. We included oranges, blueberries, apples and strawberries within our ingredients list.

Our older Nursery children used A4 paper and pencils to create their recipes. We practised sitting at the table on chairs, resting our elbows and keeping our feet flat on the floor. We started to think about the way in which we hold our mark-making tools and tried very hard to control them steadily. We all had a go at copying the letters in our name with adult modelling. When creating our ingredients list, we had a go at identifying the initial sound in each fruit. We tried copying the corresponding letter with adult support. Our adult then acted as a scribe to continue modelling the writing process. There were some fantastic ideas for fruits that the hungry caterpillar might enjoy, including peaches, pineapple and bananas!

We showed great pride in our beautiful mark-making, and rightly so! Our recipes were ready to help us make our fruit salad for the hungry caterpillar!

Making Our Fruit Salad!

On Wednesday, we were very busy working together to make our fruit salad! We remembered to wash our hands and roll up our sleeves when it was our turn. We used our child-safe knives safely and with control to chop our fruit into pieces. We then put the fruit into our large bowl and used a large spoon to give it a mix! In our fruit salad, we included pineapple, strawberry, peaches, banana and melon.

At snack time, we decided to taste-test our fruit salad for the hungry caterpillar! We enjoyed sitting together in our colour key groups to try the fruit. Our hard work had paid off and we were all in agreement that it was delicious – lots of smiles and a big thumbs up! We saved some of the fruit salad to give to our very hungry caterpillar, who also found it delicious!

We rose to our challenge this week with great success! We thought about, planned out and created our own delicious fruit salad. We all enjoyed sharing some of our fruit salad for a special snack too! You could make a fruit salad at home to share with your family this weekend. We would love to see some photographs of making food at home on Tapestry!

At Nursery, we are all working hard to develop our gross-motor skills through a variety of physical development activities. Physical Development is one of our prime areas of learning and by using our bodies in different ways, we can all develop strong motor skills to benefit all aspects of our learning.

We all enjoy joining in with ring games with Mrs Connelly each week at Nursery. In doing this, we learn how to follow sequences of movement as we move our bodies and travel around the space. We also develop our spatial awareness and learn the importance of teamwork as we move together. This is always a highlight of our week and we have all become really confident at singing the ring game songs!

We also enjoy working together to create large-scale drawings on rolls of paper when we arrive at Nursery each morning. By lying on our tummies to mark-make, we develop our core strength. This core strength enables us to use our limbs for many different things, including balancing, sitting, travelling and mark-making on different scales.

Our outdoor area provides so many opportunities for developing our gross-motor skills. Through regular practise, we are becoming more and more confident at balancing and climbing on the different apparatus available. We also really enjoy travelling on bikes and scooters around the large space to develop our coordination when moving.

There are so many ways to get moving and develop our gross-motor skills! You could go on a family walk together around the local area or visit a nearby playground to provide your child with time to practise climbing, balancing and moving on, under and through the equipment available. We would love to see some photographs on Tapestry!