Nursery 2023-2024

Welcome to our Nursery year group page for this academic year.  Throughout the year we will populate this page with our learning and experiences.  Please check back regularly for updates.

Magic of Early Years

Every so often it’s lovely to take a step back and observe how our children interact in our environment. Whether that’s showing their friends a new picture they have noticed on display, working together to create their own ideas for play and lots more in between! It’s these moments when you hear and see all that they have been learning. That’s the magic of early years!

Mouse Paint

We love it in nursery when the children ask questions as it gives opportunities to follow their interests and sometimes it happens in the most unexpected ways!  The paint brush from the red paint was accidentally put in the yellow paint. The child was a little surprised to see orange appearing on the paper when they were expecting yellow, prompting the question, why is it orange? So of course we had to find out.

We shared the story Mouse paint, a story all about 3 white mice who find out all about different colours when they begin to splash about in different coloured paint. The children explored for themselves what happened when the colour combinations from the story were mixed together. There was lots of excitement when the children were able to create the same colours as the mice.

Music Time

Les brought his guitar with him for music time. He taught us a new song about the different sounds you can hear in the countryside. It was lots of fun making all of the animal noises. 

Wake Up Shake Up

The children are enjoying Wake Up Shake Up!

Exploring

Our wintry weather has provided some lovely opportunities for exploration in the nursery garden. It all started when the children noticed the water in the water tray had frozen. We explored the concepts of freezing and melting whilst creating some beautiful ice ornaments for our garden.

Friendly Friday

What better way to spend some time on a Friendly Friday than sharing experiences with our friends.

Going Around in Circles

We’ve continued to explore circles in nursery today. We were surprised how many there were. In fact there were so many circles we had to start drawing them on our clipboards.

The Dark Den

The dark den has been a very popular choice in nursery. It has provided an inviting opportunity to explore dark, light, colours and shadows. But it has also provided a calm quiet space in amongst the exciting hustle and bustle of Christmas.

Christmas Party

We had an amazing Christmas Party.  Our day began with a very special visitor. Santa stopped for a chat with everyone and shared out the presents from his sack. Then we played lots of different party games, Musical stops, Pass the parcel, Sleeping reindeer, and Jingle bell jingle. We were brilliant dancers, joining in with the Oakey Cokey and the Reindeer Pokey. After all that dancing refreshments were needed so we stopped for a drink and some party snacks which Mrs Chambers had made for us.

Christmas at Beamish

We had a wonderful time at Beamish.

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Thank You!

A HUGE THANK YOU to our parents and grandparents for your support yesterday on our Christmas trip to Beamish.

Wriggly Nativity

Ladies and gentleman we are very proud to present to you our Twinkling Stars from our Wriggly Nativity.

A Snowy Forest School

We enjoyed a fantastic forest school Friday today. Our sensory garden looked so beautiful dusted with snow. The children have seen some spectacular seasonal changes in our sensory garden over recent weeks and what better way to understand the changing seasons than to see it and feel it for yourself!

Autumn 

Well autumn has certainly arrived. It's a good job our children have been practising putting on their coats and wellies themselves as we've definitely needed them this week.  We've enjoyed exploring autumn objects such as pumpkins and conkers. We've looked at lots of different colours, shapes and sizes of leaves.

Working Together

We have been trying really hard to work together in the nursery garden, to share the equipment, wait for our turn and then help to tidy everything up when we are finished.  We've been making up our own stories and then acting them out in our story square. As well as learning to be super actors and storytellers, we are learning how to be a great audience too.

Jen and Oliver showed us how to play Pass the Pumpkin in music time. We love singing the song, especially the big BOO!  You can sing along here.

Dough Disco Day

Thursday is Dough Disco Day in nursery. 'Dough Disco' is a fun activity for the children which combines the use of play dough with a series of hand and finger exercises designed to improve fine muscle control. The movements develop children's fine and gross motor dexterity and hand-eye coordination in preparation for future pencil skills development.

If you would like to try some at home you could use these links.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOLR3pQt8zg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL2h-apUJak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrBsNhwxzgc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSBO8N4ctJg

Don't worry if you don't have any playdough, you can roll a pair of socks into a ball and use that instead.

What a busy week!

What a busy week we've had! Here are some of our favourite moments from Friendly Friday.

Forest School

In Forest School we went treasure hunting. We filled our bags with leaves, twigs, petals, feathers and stones. Then we used what we had found to make some friendly faces.

Superworm

Last week we found lots of worms in the garden and the children wanted to find out more. So, this week we have been finding out all about worms. We've dug for worms, observed worms, added different items to our wormery, rolled playdough worms, painted worms, explored wiggly worm spaghetti, drew long worms and danced like wiggly worms too.

We loved the story of Superworm by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. If you want to listen to the story again you can find it here.

We sang about a worm with Mr Tumble, you can sing along here. We reduced the speed of the playback in the settings so that we could join in with the words and the actions, you might want to try that at home too.

Forest School Friday

We had our very first Forest School Friday in the Sensory Garden. We each took a piece of string for a walk and noticed lots of different colours on the ground. We quickly realised there was lots to see and hear above the ground too, including apples, snails, flowers and even a butterfly.

Worms

The children have shown great interest in the worms they keep finding in the nursery garden. It was so lovely to see them working together to see how many worms they could find. Then of course we had to find a house for the worms, so the children worked together to collect soil, sand and leaves to place in a jar with some gravel to make a wormery. We even added some banana skins in case they got hungry.

Musicians

We were brilliant musicians in music time with Jen. We sang along with our warm up song and remembered a lot of the actions too. Then we took turns and shared the instruments, waiting patiently until it was our turn.

If you want to sing along at home you can find it here.

Starting Nursery

We have had an absolutely lovely start to the new academic year in nursery. Our nursery children were so happy to be back. We were so proud to see how many of the routines and songs the children had remembered. Well done everyone!