Nursery

Hello and a huge welcome to our class webpage.

Our Nursery staff team are: Miss Quartermaine, Miss Newton, Miss Lucy and Miss Elena.

Here, you can find out what’s been happening in Nursery this week.

Class Update

13/05/22 - Lots of information books!

This week we read lots and lots of information books. We’ve loved learning lots of new facts!

We read about, caterpillars, ducks and plants.

We refined our cutting skills with some great activities that Miss Newton made. Some of us made feathers, some of us made jellyfish.

We’ve planted cress and we’re hoping that it will grow for our egg and cress sandwiches next week. We were quite surprised to see how quickly it started to grow.

Last week we started to learn how to paint with our watercolour paints. It’s so relaxing and we’re very keen. This week we have been decorating pictures of teapots and mugs, adding leaves and blossom to trees and adding colours and plants to vases.

Have a lovely weekend!

06/05/22

Dear all,

Another week has zoomed by, and what a week it’s been!

There’s been lots of staring at those eggs in the incubator to see if they will hatch- they haven’t! It’s still a bit of a wait. Roughly 15 days to go!

Our caterpillars have put on a much speedier performance and today saw our first chrysalis forming. It won’t be too long and we’ll have a lovely net of butterflies to release into the garden.

Tuesday was a mega baking day, Miss Lucy and Zac made us cinnamon, scotch pankcakes and Miss Quartermaine opened an egg cafe in the afternoon. We got to choose between- scrambled, fried or dippy eggs. the dippy eggs were by far the most popular!

This week we turned our hand to watercolour painting. We painted lots of different types of eggs, either life like or from our own imagination.

We had a bumper delivery of buckets and spades etc for the sandpit. so, many hours have been spent digging and making sand castles.

Friday was a very exciting day, we had grandparents in to visit us. It was so lovely to meet so many lovely grandparents.

We hope you all have a fab weekend.

 

29/04/22

Dear all,

We had a lovely week in Nursery. It seems to have flown by.

Last week we had some teeny weeny caterpillars arrive and we gave each of them their own little home stocked up with plenty of food. This week they have been very hungry caterpillars and have grown much bigger.

Our eggs are sitting happily in the incubator and we are eagerly awaiting the arrival of our ducklings.

All these exciting nature projects have inspired our learning this week and we have been reading information books about lifecycles.

We learnt lots of fun facts about caterpillars and drew the lifecycle of the caterpillar/butterfly.

Our word of the week was: Growing and we talked about all the things we could think of that grow.

We have been playing dice games for mathematics and practised counting out the correct number of objects. We then compared our group with our friend and decided who had most and who had fewer. We also learnt to recognise the numerals 1-5 and show the correct fingers to match them.

For phonics we learnt the picture cards: snake, net, mountain, dinosaur, apple, orange, girl, pirate, tower, insect.

Next week we are learning all about eggs!

Have a lovely weekend.

22/04/22- welcome back

Welcome back. I hope you all had a lovely Easter break. We’ve been hearing all about the exciting things you got up to.

There was huge excitement in class this week as a few of us (those that missed the farm trip with Chicken Pox) got to go to Mudchute farm to collect some very special eggs.

We’ve got some fertilised duck eggs for our incubator and, if we’re very lucky, in 28 days we’ll be hearing the pitter patter of ducks feet!

It’s been a short week back, but we’ve squeezed in lots of fun and learning. We’ve mostly been talking about eggs and ducks, but we also had time to learn a few of the picture cards from our phonics scheme. So far we know; apple, snake, dinosaur, tower, mountain.

01/04/22 - Easter

Happy Easter to you all!

We spent the last week of term making lovely Easter cards and crosses to take home in our Easter goody bags.

We had a brilliant Easter bonnet Parade or hats were amazing and Z looked fab in his t-shirt!

We also had a very exciting egg hunt in the garden and some of us struck lucky later in the day because we found some left over eggs outside!

 

Zones of Regulation

I’ve had a chat with a few of you this week about the Zones of Regulation and how it can help your child to start to regulate their own emotions.

Here’s a quick crash course in how it works….

First and foremost, the zones of regulation are not about sanctions and rewards. They’re about identifying which zone your behaviour/mood/feeling is in and what you can do to help yourself feel better. It’s not about “well done for being in the green zone, here’s a reward” or “Oh dear, you are in the red zone, here’s a punishment!”

We need all the children to understand that we all have a range of feelings and we all end up in different zones and different times. It’s perfectly normal and natural to experience a full range of emotions. What we want them to be able to do, is start to identify and name how they feel, and think about what they can do about it. It’s all about learning to regulate ourselves and develop emotional intelligence.

There are four zones:

Blue– bored, tired, sad, unwell

 Green-happy, calm, content, focussed, ready to learn or play.

Yellow– anxious, confused, excited, worried, frustrated

Red– angry, aggressive, hyper, terrified, out of control. (we’ve talked a lot on class about how we can feel like we might explode when we reach this level.)

 

This is what our class chart looks like:

Zones of Regulation feelings A4 1.2

we have used characters, pictures from story books and clipart to illustrate the feelings.

We’ve started off by introducing the Zones this week with lots of different stories and talking about how the characters are feeling and what zones those feelings are in. We then discussed how they could help themselves with these feelings by looking at the following posters:

how can I help myself?

The next step is starting to relate this to ourselves. At the moment we need a lot of adult support for this. The adults can helping us out by saying things like…….”oh you’re very excited, we need to calm down a bit now, you’re in the yellow zone, what can we do to help you to the green zone?” We can then look at the poster together and work out what what is the best thing to do. Of course, not every action in each zone fits every feeling in the same zone, so it takes a bit of getting used to.  Also the actions we have chosen are very specific to our class and what we have agreed together to helpful actions.

You can help us out at home by articulating your own feelings and relating them to the zones. “Oh I feel a bit in the yellow zone because…….. So i’ll sit quietly with a cup of tea!” (good luck with that quiet cup of tea!)

You can also help us identify our own feelings and and help us pick appropriate actions if we need help to regulate.

One of the key things for us as adults is, allowing the children to regulate their emotions before we deal with anything that may have happened.

So, we might get a child that’s in the red zone to go on the trampoline before we speak to them about an incident that has occurred. Once they are calmer, we can speak to them about their options for making things right again i.e. you could say sorry, give a hug etc.

Making our mistakes right is also really important, but it comes after the regulating part.

Here’s the editable versions of our documents if you would like them:

Zones of Regulation feelings A4 1.2

how can I help myself?

During the week we have read some fantastic books to help us think about feelings and the Zones. Here are some of our favourites:

• My Big Shouting Day- Rebecca Patterson
• The Colour Monster-Anna LLenas
• Ruby’s worry- Tom Percival
• Fergal is Fuming- Robert Starling
• Ravi’s Roar- Tom Percival

Hopefully that gives you all a bit of a crash course in what we do at nursery to manage our feelings!

 

25/03/21- The elves and the Shoemaker

Hello!

This week we have been reading the Elves and the Shoemaker. We kicked off the week with a very special loan of a bag of shoes from Mrs Hardy. It turns out Mrs Hardy has a fab collection of shoes! We had a chat about the ones we liked best and tried them on too. the blue boots were very popular, as were the spangly, gold sandals.

We’ve been learning to identify different parts of our shoes and can talk about the tongue, sole, straps and whether we have laces or velcro.

We’ve been busy making our own small books of the story and retelling it in our own words.

For our personal, social and emotional development we have been talking about the Zones of Regulation and how to identify and manage our own emotions- more on this in my next blog!

Have a fab weekend. Happy Mother’s Day (raid your book bags, there’s a card in there for the mummies!)

 

18/03/22- Jack and the Beanstalk

This week we have been reading the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. A magical golden egg appeared in our class this week and we had to wait all week to see what exciting thing was inside.

We drawn giants by drawing around ourselves and then decorating them.

Our mathematically skills have been stretched with magic bean counting. We have been learning to subitise (recognise small groups of objects without counting.)We had to see how quickly we could work out how many magic beans were under each cup.

For our classical and traditional music piece we listened to Peter and the Wolf again! We love it so much we ask for it every week!

Our word of the week was lucky- we thought about lots of different ways to be lucky.

For phonics we’ve been learning a new game and a new skill. Our game is Cross the River and we’ve learning to blend together the sounds in words i.e. cross the river if you have the h-a-t and all the children with a hat cross the river.

We’ve also enjoyed some good radio shows to practise our listening skills.

Our teachers are super impressed with us as we are learning so fast.

11/03/22 Hansel and Gretel

This week we read the story of Hansel and Gretel. We read lots of different versions and decided which was the best. Our absolute favourite was the version where the witch is good and Hansel and Gretel are very naughty!

Of course, all those sweeties in the book meant we needed to do some work with sweeties this week.

We did a brilliant experiment with sweetie skittles and made them into a rainbow. It was very exciting!

For our maths work, we had a tube of Smarties. We had to tip them out, sort them by colour and then stick the correct number sticker next to each group. We had to find out which colour we had the most of. Miss Quartermaine was very sad because she got no orange Smarties, but lucky Toby got 10! After all our hard work we were allowed to eat some!

We made sweetie house for Hansel and Gretel using our junk modelling resources. they were brilliant. we added chimneys, doors, windows and small pictures of sweets. We are becoming excellent inventors and artists!

Next week we are reading Jack and the Beanstalk.

04/03/22- Arts Week

We have had a very busy and very enjoyable Arts Week.

We have been creating all sorts of pieces of Art and our self portraits will be on display at the Arts cafe next week.

We have been learning about colour mixing and read the book, Mouse Paint to help us learn how to make primary colours into secondary colours.

We’ve explored potato and cork printing and printed our own rainbows.

We’ve all started making our own Art journals and we’re keeping our work in them to share with you at the end of the year.

On Tuesday we opened our very own pancake cafe and we all put toppings on our own pancakes and ate them. They were delicious!

next week we are reading the story of Hansel and Gretal.

25/02/22- a few farm photos

25/02/22

On Thursday, Nursery had a fantastic trip to the farm. The day kicked off with a meet and greet with small, furry animals. We met rabbits, chickens, geese, chinchillas, rats and fancy mice. The children got to hold them and stroke them. We had to frisk miss Elena  to make sure she didn’t bring the chinchilla back as she was rather attached to him.
We had a tour of the farm and met the bigger animals. Some of us bravely fed them. The goats were very hungry. The calf slobbered all over Miss Quartermaine, so there weren’t many takers for feeding her after that! Next we met the exotic pets and we got to see a scorpion light up under a torch and try on a snake as a necklace. Even some of the teachers tried the snake on! Miss Valerie looked very comfy in her snake necklace!
Packed lunches were a highlight as always, you just can’t beat a good packed lunch on a school trip!
Lastly, we went to see Ozzie the owl who flew over our heads. Miss Newton regretted her choice of seating when Ozzie nearly landed on her head! Then, it was back to the bus for a quick nap on the way back to school. What a fantastic day we had!

11/02/22- The Three Bears

Hello. What a busy half term we’ve had and it seems to have disappeared in puff of smoke!

This week we’ve been busy reading the Three Little Bears.

We’ve been sorting objects by size; small, medium and large and deciding which bed etc belongs to which bear.

We did a fantastic retelling of the story with Miss whitehead. The bears were so fierce that goldilocks got stage fright.

After half term, we’ll be off to the farm.

Have a lovely week.

28/01/22- Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Hello, this week has been all about the Three Little Pigs.

We made some enormous box houses to play an in and pretended to be the pigs and the wolf. It wasn’t quite the traditional retelling as we had about 20 pigs in our houses and Miss Quartermaine was on permeant wolf duty. She didn’t manage to blow our houses down, but the 20 little pigs accidently squashed them in their excitement.

 

We’ve been busy writing our own mini stories of the Three Pigs. Most of us prefer the ending where all the pigs made it safely to the brick house and we’re all really sold on the merits of bricks and cement. You know you have a class predominantly of boys when you spend long conversations discussing cement!

We have been learning all about 2d shapes and can now say (and usually recognise) rhombus and parallelogram!

It’s been a busy old week and we’re looking forward to our farm trip next week!

21/01/22 - What Big Eyes you Have!

Hello,

We’ve been reading Red Riding Hood this week. We read a few different versions and debated which ending was the best.

Our Word of the Week was sneaky. See if you can fit that into a sentence this weekend. We’ve been using it a lot at school to describe the wolf.

This half term we have started to learn about alliteration- words that start with the same sound. We’ve played a great game called Silly Soup (see if your small person can demonstrate) and sorted out all the toys with the same sound to go in our very silly soup.

We’ve carried on with our work on shapes and we’re busy learning our 2d shape names.

For cooking we made cheese straws, they made the classroom smell delicious!

14/01/22- Run, Run as fast as you can!

Run, Run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man.

Well, actually, we did catch him in the end!

I’m sure most of you will have already heard about the exciting events in Nursery this week.

On Monday we made gingerbread men, we put them in the oven, left them out to cool and low and behold, they all escaped!

So Tuesday became a very exciting day of inventing traps and my word, we are good at engineering when we have a purpose in mind! Lots of brilliant traps were built, plus a gingerbread detection hat! then, we pretended it was home time, set the traps, snuck out of the classroom and…… tah dah, we caught all the gingerbread men.

Lots of excellent thinking, inventing and language skills happened through the week due to those cheeky gingerbread men.

Our word of the week was catch/caught and we had plenty of chances to use them as we read the story so many times.

We’ve also been learning the shapes- square, circle, triangle, rectangle, oval and rhombus. we’ve been talking about their properties and talking about how we know a square is a square etc.

All in all, a very exciting week and we’ll look forward to more fun next week when we read the story of Red Riding Hood.

07/01/22

Hello and welcome to 2022. Let’s hope it’s a year of less viruses!

We’ve got off to a brilliant start. everyone (well, almost everyone) made a happy appearance back into class and we’re thrilled to see each other- absence makes the heart grow fonder!

We’ve had a marvellous time playing together and catching up with our Christmas News.

Our garden has had a makeover and has sprung some grass (fake grass, but it looks better) and we’ve really enjoyed being outside.

In class we have been reading the books Triangle, Square and circle by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen. Triangle was our very favourite story so far. We learnt a few new words; genius, sculptor and artist. Can you guess what we are learning about in maths this term?

We have a new student teacher with us; Miss Whitehead. She’s made a fabulous start to her teaching career and will be with us until February half term. Miss Oumayma has now finished her teaching practice with us and is back at university. She will pop in and see us for a few days though.

We started to learn some positional language words; in, on, under, next to, behind, in front, between. And we practised following instructions with these words in.

Wow! Amazing how much we can pack into two days.

Next week we are reading the story of the gingerbread man. We’d love donations of junk items for building traps (see parentmail!)

Have a fab weekend!

17/12/21- aaaaaand relax!

Phew, we made it through the whole term! A brilliant first term from all of us and we’re feeling nice and settled in.

We’ve had a lovely week making our Christmas crafts and filling our goody bags up for the end of the year.

We’ve been playing elves in the home corner and pretending that it’s Christmas.

this week has been nice and relaxed, full of fun, crafts and play.

Miss Oumayma leaves us today to return to university. We wish her well. She’s had a great first teaching practice in our class.

Thank you for all of our lovely presents and cards. You have truly spoilt us!

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and a happy and healthy New Year.

We’ll see you in 2022!

10/12/21- Christmas fun!

This week we have been learning about Christmas and making lots of fun Christmassy things.

We read ‘Just Right for Christmas’ and talked about giving presents and what makes a good present. We then had to think about what presents other people might like (much harder!) and how we choose a present for another person.

We’ve been busy little elves making things for our Christmas goodie bags- very exciting!

Today was, of course the-best-day-ever because we had Christmas lunch with our families and watched our Nursery Nativity DVD. A huge pat on the back to all the children who were marvellous at their parts and told the story beautifully.

03/12/21

What a week we had! Such excitement for the start of December.

This week we have been learning all about the Nativity Story. We should  all be able to tell you the story now. We’ve read lots of different versions and had fun discussing how the story can be told slightly differently. We’ve also had a go at being an author and writing our own Christmas story. They are taking us a long time, so we will continue next week too.

In class we have been making some secret goodies for our Christmas goody bags.

We’ve listened to Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Candy Canes. and danced along.

Next week, we have our Nativity DVD and Christmas Lunch event for you to come to on Thursday- please check parentmail for details.  The children have been working very hard, filming their part of the Nativity and this weekend they will all be edited together to make the whole story for you to come and watch. You’ll also be able to buy a copy in the last week of term.

Have a lovely weekend.

26/11/21- Stick man

This week we have been enjoying the story of Stick man.

We made our own stick people from sticks and decorated them with scarves and eyes etc. They look fabulous.

We’ve helped Stick man learn to count and helped him count out the correct number of sticks from a larger group.

On Wednesday afternoon we were treated to a Mr Benn theatre show.

The biggest event of the week was on Thursday morning when most of us managed to film our parts for the class nativity. Now all the bits of film will be edited together and made into a DVD.

On Friday 10th December, one parent/carer for each child can come to school and watch the Nativity and have Christmas Lunch with us.

Next week we will be learning the Nativity story.

19/11/21- Autumn Days

This week we have been learning all about autumn.

We learnt that the leaves change colour and fall off the trees and come back again in the spring.

We have read some lovely autumn stories; with Leaf Thief and Tap the magic Tree being our favourites.

Our word of the week was crunchy and we explored lots of crunchy things- crunchy leaves, crunchy paper, crunchy cereal etc

next week we will be reading Stick Man. We’d love everyone to find a stick and bring it to school for next week to make their own Stick Man.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend.

12/11/21- Woodland week

This week we have been learning all about woodland animals and our word of the week was woodland.

We all have a special group that we belong to in our class. There’s badgers, hedgehogs, foxes, moles, squirrels, and owls. We have enjoyed learning about our group animals and reading lots of stories with them in.

We’ve made clay hedgehogs, built craft nests for pretend owls and made chocolate bonfire apples.

Our music piece for this week was Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture. We conducted the piece with our dancing scarves then zoomed around the classroom with them pretending that they were fireworks.

For cookery we made chocolate apples on sticks- yum! Needless to say we all enjoyed those!

 

We also made poppies for Remembrance day and took part in a two minute silence, in fact, we were so diligent with our silence that it went on for about five minutes.

We had a big step forwards with our social skills and discovered group humour! We made up silly songs about the teachers (with their permission) and fell about laughing.

We’ve continued to enjoy rhyming and read a very silly book called; The Who’s Whonicorn of Unicorns.

Our counting challenge this week was to count woodland animals.

Phew, busy days, but lots of fun!

05/11/21- welcome back

Hello and welcome back to another busy half term.

This week we have been learning all about Diwali and bonfire night.

Our word of the week was; celebration, see if you can fit that into a conversation this weekend and talk about what it means. This is a really handy word for us to learn as there’s lots of Celebrations to learn about at the moment.

For our Diwali topic we made clay diyas, chalk rangoli patterns and made coconut barfi to eat. We had a look on google earth and found India and talked about how the festival originated from there.

Our main topics for the half term are Autumn and Celebrations.

We’ve started to learn to rhyme in our phonics sessions and played an excellent game called Willoughby Wallaby woo. Rhyming is a really important step towards reading as it helps us play with the sounds of words and hear that some words have similar sound patterns.

For maths this half term, we are working on representing numbers with our finger. We’re singing lots of fun number songs and learning how to add on and take away on our fingers. We’ve also started the much trickier task of learning how to find different ways to make a number with our fingers i.e. three fingers on one hand none on the other or two fingers on one hand and one on the other.

Fun times!

22/10/21

Phew, what a busy half term we had!

Such a great start to Nursery life. We’ve all settled in well and we’re finding our voices and personalities.

We’ve had a jam packed Black Voices Week. We learnt about Mae Jemison and how she became an astronaut and flew to space. We did lots of brilliant space themed activities including making space sock puppets and junk modelling space rockets and planets.

15/10/21- Hola!

Hola! It’s been Hispanic week in Nursery.

We’ve been learning about Peru.

On Monday, we found Peru on Google Earth and pretended to fly there. We had a good look at the ariel view and decided that we could see the sea and some beach and some mountains.

We read a lovely book called, Carolina’s Gift about a young girl who goes to market to find a present for Granny. She looks all around the market and finally decides that Granny would like a walking stick so that she can come to market too!

We made cacti from clay and decorated them with match stick prickles and Miss Lucy bought us a big llama balloon that we dressed in numbered scarves.

It was a very fun week and next week we have lots more fun to come- Black Voices week, DT Day and Red card to Racism Day.

We’d love lots of bits for junk modelling please and a sock that can be made into a sock puppet.

Have a great weekend!

08/10/21- The Very Hungry Caterpillar

This week we read the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We counted all the fruits and worked out how many things he had eaten.

We played lots of dice games and practised recognising (subitising) or counting the spots on the dice then counting out the correct amount of things from a big group.

We learnt the days of the week and Miss Quartermaine and Miss Newton taught us their favourite days of the week songs.

We printed pictures of the Hungry Caterpillar and made observational drawings of his fruits.

In the garden we’ve been exploring the climbing apparatus and painting conkers pink for one of our maths games.

Next week we are off to Peru for Hispanic week. We will be taking part in lots of Peruvian activities!

01/10/21- Dear Zoo

We’ve had a lovely week reading the story of Dear Zoo.

On Thursday we made up our own version of the book using the toy pets we had brought to school. We had all sorts of animals in our story and we thought of ways to describe them: big, jumpy, fluffy, cuddly etc.

Those of us that felt inspired made our own pet carriers to take our animals home in.

We’ve also made jumpy frogs, elephant masks, pictures of the animals and our own playdough.

All in all it was a very busy week!

24/09/21- We're Going on a Bear Hunt

Hello and welcome to another week of Nursery fun.

This week we have been reading, ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.’ It’s been so much fun. We’ve all enjoyed reading along.

On Thursday morning we made a big Bear Hunt in the garden and put our wellies on and stomped through the mud, snow, forest, river etc and found the bear in the cave.

We’ve made bear faces and paw prints and we’ll pop them up on display for you to see.

We also did some magic painting (marbling) and all made a lovely cover for our own special books.

17/09/21- And so we begin!

Hello! A massive welcome to our first update of the year!

Our littlest people are settling in well to school. They have found their feet in the classroom and made a good start to school life. Some of the class have found their voices already and others are still a bit reserved, but we are very sure that won’t be for long.

It was our first full week this week and we have done mightily well.

We’ve all stayed for lunch and worked out how to feed ourselves, wait for our friends to finish eating and scrape our own plates and put our things away. Monday and Tuesday lunch were rather busy whilst we worked out our new routine, but now we are like lunch time professionals and we’re even learning to line up at the bin to dispose of anything we haven’t eaten! Though there’s not much waste as most of us eat quite well. Lunch highlights this week were sausages and burritos (not at the same time!)

There’s still a few tears from time to time which is to be expected, but they are always short lived and we manage to keep busy and (usually) enjoy ourselves.

We had our first music lesson on Monday with Mr Yusef. It was great fun. We learnt lots of new songs.

We’ve read Brown Bear, Brown Bear together and enjoyed working out which animals come next. The children are far better at this than the adults!

Just a reminder to send in plenty of spare clothes- the messy activities are very popular! (some of us also forget to run to the loo in time.)

We’d be grateful for donations of:

• kitchen roll tubes
• green plastic bottles (to make 10 green bottles!)
• conkers, acorns, pebbles, short sticks (roughly 20cm or less- no big ones at the mo!)

 

We can always make use of envelopes, cards, paper plates etc if you have any random ones left over from a pack that you’re not going to use.

 

Hope you have a lovely weekend. We’ll see you all next week for lots more fun.