Nursery

Hello and a huge welcome to our class webpage.

Our Nursery staff team are: Miss Quartermaine (M,Tu,Th,F), Mrs Foster (M, W) and Miss Johnson (M-F)

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

Class Update

25/11/22- The Nativity begins....

This week we made a start to filming our Nativity. We managed to get most of it done on Tuesday, but a few of our little friends were missing so we still have some extra bits to film with them.

There were a few dramas as we handed out costumes as some of us wanted to be Princess Elsa or a policeman, but we had a good chat about the story and remembered that they were not present at the birth of Jesus!

We can’t wait for you to come and watch, it’s set to be quite an entertaining production!

Aside form filming we’ve been busy making our own Stick Men. We’ve had many excitable retellings of the story and today our Stick Men get to join us for story time- let’s hope they enjoy it.

Mrs Foster and Miss Johnson got into the Bake Off spirit and helped us make elephant biscuits. They were delicious.

We’ve enjoyed lots of lessons with our toy rabbits Luna and Alfie. We’ve been teaching them how to keep their hands to themselves (i.e. not poking a friends in a fit of excitement!) The rabbits are learning very quickly and we are very good at teaching them.

 

18/11/22

Thank you so much to all of you that managed to have a catch up with me for Parents Evening. Lovely to be able to spend a few minutes chatting to you about your little one and the joys of Nursery life. If you were abruptly cut off, it was the computer, not me! It automatically closes every appointment at 10 minutes to make me stay on time.

This week we’ve been reading some fun books about transport, getting ready to film our nativity (more about that via email) and thinking a lot about being kind, learning to wait and doing so patiently!

We’ve introduced the children to the Zones of Regulation (we just call the the Zones with the children.) The Zones of Regulation help us learn to manage our feelings.

In it’s most simple terms there are four zones:

• Blue zone- feeling sad, too tired, bored, lonely or unwell
• Green Zone feeling happy calm and ready for play/friendship/learning
• Yellow Zone- feeling anxious, worried confused, frustrated, over excited
• Red Zone- angry, aggressive, hyper or terrified.

obviously for all of us (adults included) we feel our best and most regulated when we are in the Green Zone. However, children are taught that there’s no right zone to be in. All these feelings are natural and acceptable, but we have to learn to manage them appropriately.

The aim of the zones is to help children learn to regulate. We have a little chart in the classroom that shows us the zones and then some colour posters that help us learn what we can do to help ourselves with big  feelings.

For example, if we are feeling tired we know we can take ourselves off to the book corner for some quiet time.

If we are feeling angry, frustrated, over excited or overwhelmed with tears we take some deep breaths and try to regulate our bodies that way. See if your little one can show you how we take deep breaths- they’re really good when we practise.

It’s a really good little system for helping children learn to regulate themselves and it’s something we use across the whole school.

When we’ve felt overwhelmed by our big feelings this week the adults have been helping us look at the zones display, discussing what we feel and then looking for a solution to help ourselves. We also use it if we have upset someone else or had a falling out with a friend as it helps us look for problem solving strategies with our relationships too.

You can see our Zones of Regulation pictures on the kitchen by our water bottles and below:

Zones of Regulation feelings A4 1.2

how can I help myself?

We’ve also got two lovely (soft toy) rabbits, Luna and Alfie, who come to nursery and we teach them the skills they need to make friends and manage their friendships. The rabbits act out a little scenario for us and then your children become the teachers and teach Luna and Alfie how to solve the problem. So far we’ve taught them how to say hello nicely, how to share and take turns, how to wait for a toy that they want to play with and how to put their socks and shoes on. Luna and Alfie don’t have their nursery uniforms yet, but they will do when Miss Quartermaine has time to finish making them! Then we will be able to teach them to get dressed!

We’ve also had a very exciting delivery of toys from the 80s. Fresh from Miss Quartermaine’s parents’ loft! I wonder how many of you recognise some of these from your childhood? I know some of you recognised them this morning. Your children have enjoyed brushing their hair today and taking them for a picnic in the home corner.

Finally, we have lots of lost things without names- M&S cardis, school jumpers, smock, fleece, gloves etc. Please could you take a look and check for your things?

 

 

04/11/22 - Diwali and Bonfire Night

We’ve had a lovely first week back. We were all really pleased to see each other again.

We’ve been learning all about the Hindu festival of Diwali and making our own Rangoli patterns.

Towards the end of the week we started to learn about bonfire night too. So lots of lovely colourful celebrations.

We’ve been practising our counting skills with some fun counting games and songs. This week’s game was strawberries in a basket where we had to roll the dice and count out the correct number of strawberries. Our song was five speckled frogs.

We’ve been making some lovely firework pictures using a variety of household objects for printing.

The children have been really into cutting out this week. So if any of you would like to practise at home, an old magazine and a pair of scissors will keep them busy for a while. The children love looking for things to cut out and stick.

Next week we’ll be having a pirate week and a bit of learning about Autumn too.

Have a lovely weekend.

21/10/22 Black Voices Week

This week we celebrated Black Voices with with lots of brilliant books.

We kicked off the week by reading Everybody in the Red Brick Building. Then we made our own houses and stuck pictures of our families inside. We’ve made a beautiful display of all of our wonderful work in the classroom.

We’ve also enjoyed the following books:

So Much- Trish Cooke

Baby Goes to market and Catch that Chicken by Atinuke.

In other news, we made slime. And oh my, it WAS slimy! Loads of fun to play with for those that were brave enough to touch, but it took AGES to clean up. Luckily small children are always ready to help with washing up so we’ve been scrubbing green slime off of our dinosaurs all morning.

Aside form all that there’s been lots of lovely playing and we’re all settling in well to Nursery life.

14/01/22 Princess Dress in her Pasta Palace

This week we have been reading about Princess Dress who lives in a Pasta Palace and doesn’t know which colour dress to wear to her party. It’s lots of fun and we are getting very good at recalling the sequence of the story.

We made our own pasta palace pictures with lots of pasta. We designed some beautiful princess dresses. We painted watercolour pictures with lots of beautiful colours and we sorted out lots of things into colour groups- bears, pom poms, sorting people etc. All in all a very creative and colourful week.

Next week is Black Voices Week and we will be reading lots of fun books by black authors and delving into some poetry and rhymes too.

Have a fab weekend!

07/09/22- We're going on a Bear Hunt

We had a lovely week reading We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.

We made our own bear hunt in the garden and stomped barefoot through all the things in the book- water, mud, snow etc. and we found a bear at the end.

On Thursday we all bought our teddies to school and made sandwiches for our teddy bear’s picnic.

Lots of fun all round!

Next week we are reading a book called; Princess Dress which has lots of lovely colour in it.

 

30/09/22 - Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you See?

This week we read a very popular book that has been in circulation for so long that Miss Quartermaine remembers reading in her first class at school! It was Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Bill martin Junior and Eric Carle.

We had a great time reading together and trying to remember which animal came next. Our friend Jojo had the best memory and could do the whole book in order, but we were all pretty good at remembering.

We’ve made our own class version on the book to read next week. It is full of photos of ourselves. We had to practise our scissor skills by cutting out our own pictures and sticking them in.

It was Harvest festival on Thursday and we read the story of: The Last Chip. It’s about a very hungry pigeon who can’t find anything to eat. We also read, Eat up Gemma, all about a baby who won’t eat anything.

We then thought about our favourite foods and what we’d like to thank God for. We made Harvest plates by cutting and sticking our favourite foods onto paper plates. They’re up on the classroom wall if you’d like to see what we thanked God for (Vanilla ice cream was very popular!)

Mrs Foster (Our Wednesday teacher) took us on a colour hunt to see what we could spot around the classroom and also helped us make a giant person.

We’ve been singing: 5 Little Men in a Flying Saucer, Tommy Thumb is Up and the Animal Fair song.

Miss Johnson taught us our very first Spanish lesson. We learnt some numbers and some animals.

We enjoyed Music, Kick London and Gymnastics (loved the sock choices for gym day, thank you!)

23/09/22- Dear Zoo

This week we have been reading the story of Dear Zoo. We are getting very good at retelling parts of the story by ourselves.

In honour of our story, Mrs Foster helped us to make some snakes from paper chains.

We’ve really enjoyed the 10 Elephant song again! (and again and again!) Ask your children to teach you it, it is a bit of an ear worm though, so you’ll probably spend the whole weekend humming it.

We’re getting even better at coming into school happily and there are much less tears throughout the day.

We made our first loaf of bread in the bread maker. It was very tasty and we had it warm with butter at the end of the day.

The home corner has been very busy with people playing make believe games. There’s been a lot of doctor role play happening and we’ve all had numerous check ups with the nursery doctors.

Next week we will be reading Brown Bear Brown Bear and going on a colour hunt.

16/09/22- week two!

It was our first full time week at school. We have done very well and all our learning so far is focussed on helping us feel more relaxed in class and learning how to be part of a group.

We have been learning to sit in a circle, line up and walk together and sit at the tables for lunch. We’ve also learnt how to put our lunch things away and put our things on our pegs. None of which sound terrible exciting, but they’re important group skills to learn and they help us feel more confident in class.

We’ve managed to listen to a few good stories together. we especially like the Hairy Toe and The Bartholomew Bear collection.

Our favourite song in class is currently Five Fat peas because we have a bit of stretchy lycra that we stretch wide and then let go of so it flies away at the end of the song.

We have been busy making hand prints and beautiful marbled papers for our Special Books. these are going to be books all about us, filled up with photos and comments.

We met Miss Rachel who will teach us music on Mondays and Mr Alastair that will teach us PE.

We had our first proper gymnastics lesson today too. It was great fun and we learnt a few gymnastics moves and danced to some funny songs.

There’s definitely a more relaxed air in the class and most of the children now manage to come in happily in the morning. We’re making really good progress!

 

09/09/22- And so it begins...

Hello! A busy and somewhat tearful start to term for our little people. But, they are doing a tremendous job of settling in. It’s always hard in the first week!

There’s been lots of exploring our classroom and garden to see what we can do. The water tray has been a big hit and there’s also been a lot of playdough waffles and pancakes made.

We have started to build in a little bit of routine which is very important for making us feel secure and letting us develop our sense of time.

We managed to say a quick hello to each other on the carpet and we’ve sung a few songs. Five Fat Peas has been really popular and raucous laughter could be heard throughout the class as we made our stretchy, Lycra pod pop. We also loved meeting Miss Quartermaine’s collection of Thai elephants and learning the song, 10 Elephants Went Out to Play.

We had our first lunches on Thursday and Friday and the majority of us managed to eat a good amount of food. The teachers were really pleased.

So all in all, a good start despite the tears and eventually those tears will turn to smiles and laughter.

Have a great weekend!