The Bog Baby

24th September 2026Sarah Winkley

This week Nursery children have been thinking about, what does caring for animals look like? The children were immersed in pond life through the exciting and magical text, “The Bog Baby”.

In the story two little girls capture a “Bog Baby” from the pond in Bluebell Woods and take him home in a jar. Although the girls love and try to care for the creature, unfortunately he becomes sick. The Nursery children compassionately thought about why he became ill….Would a Bog Baby really eat cake? Live in clean water with shells? Or be walked on a lead?

We learned a super simple song about pets, which sang all about regular pets, but then suggested that someone might have a pet lion. The children were questioned whether a lion would make a good pet? They decided it would not with some of the following reasons; “It would eat you”, “It would scratch”, “It’d be too big” and “It would smash your house”. This showed good reasoning and we were then Slinky Linky Snakes and linked this back to the Bog Baby; as a Lion and a Bog Baby are both wild animals and would be better in their natural environments where they are safe and can live their healthiest lives.

The children worked collaboratively to create two large pieces artwork of the Bog Baby which they have decorated to add extra magic.

They have also created their own Bog Baby that they can take home and care for using salt dough. Each child sculpted and decorated their Bog Baby individually, making choices about how they would decorate it. They are adorable, just look at our beautiful work!

As part of our Tranquil Tuesday Crew the children we introduced to The Tales Tool Kit resource which helps children create and structure stories, developing language and excitement through 4 key points; character, setting, problem and solution. Our stories were focused around animals which weren’t pets this week to link in with our expedition.

Our Thoughtful Thursday Crew engaged the children in a step by step tutorial of drawing their own Bog Babies, following the teacher model. Their listening and attention was superb, almost as good as their artwork! To check in we consolidated whether or not the Bog Baby Would prefer to live in clean or dirty water? The children expressed their opinions and gave reasons for their answers confirming that he would prefer to be in the pond, in the mud, water and plants.

Just a magical week Nursery, You are Being Kind, Working Hard and Getting Smart!!

Have you filled a Bucket Today?

24th September 2026Sarah Winkley

On Monday, the week beginning the 14th September the Nursery children were greeted by our “Kindness Elves” who had brought them another text and some buckets? The children were excited to know why the elves had brought them a pair of buckets.

As we investigated further into our first case study of what does caring look like? The children explored the text “Have you filled a bucket today?” I was talking about emotional buckets and the children were very excited to think that they each had an invisible bucket. We thought about what we could fill our buckets up with and the children suggested; “water”, “sand”, “slime”, “dinosaurs”, “worms” and “sea creatures”. After reading the text it became clear that we needed to fill each others buckets with happiness and kindness, which would in turn fill up our own buckets. We thought hard about how we could do this and the children were guided and encouraged to sort things that may fill up their or other peoples buckets or also quickly empty them.

We all tried to adopt the name of being a “Bucket Filler” by being caught doing kind things for our friends and grown ups in class. When the children were caught being kind or spreading happiness, they made it onto the Kindness bucket list and were given the title of a “Bucket Filler!” Our class bucket was bursting!

The children made their friends or special people out of pebbles, using their fine motor and creative skills to show who filled up their buckets. They also produced some beautiful drawings inside a bucket, of things that made them happy and filled their buckets. Great work Nursery!

Hook Week – What does caring look like?

14th September 2026Sarah Winkley

Last week Nursery were hooked into our Be Kind, How do we show we care expedition with the launch of our key text The Everywhere Bear. Miss Tunney kindly provided Nursery with their very own Everywhere Bears that we can learn to care for, by taking them home each weekend for adventures.

Nursery learned that caring is looking after each other and our things. In our text, the Everywhere Bear gets lost and we have been thinking hard about how we could care for the bear to keep him safe. We thought how our own families are special and what belonging to a family means, as they help, love and keep us safe. The children took part in special family orientated crews on Wise Wednesday and Thoughtful Thursday, piecing together what makes our families special… quite literally.

The children took part in a thought shower of ideas that would keep the bear safe, from our own experiences of how our parents look after us. The result was that we decided to make identity bracelets for the bears.

Nursery then agreed it would be kind to share the love and safety around the school, to any other class or crew bears, to help be able to identify them easily if they ever got lost and to keep them safe. So the children gifted each class and staff members bracelets for their teddy bears.

Such beautiful and powerful learning to the beginning of expedition, to truly understand what it means to care for someone or something else – Well done Nursery!

Crew Weeks

6th September 2026Sarah Winkley

Over the past two weeks Nursery have been introduced to Crew and what that means for us as a school. They are beginning to understand that we are all friends and part of a community where we share and care for one another with kindness at the heart of everything we do. The children have made an excellent start to their school learning journey and have had lots of fun exploring and experimenting in the new environment.

The children have learned to circle up at the beginning of their sessions and use their crew mascot as a tool to recognise when it is their turn to speak and share for checking in or taking part. We have explored our zones of regulations, helping the children to name and identify their feelings more easily. They used a lolly pop stick to choose which feeling monster they identified with at that time linked to one of our crew texts; “The Colour Monster Goes to School”.

In our second week we had an exciting visit from the “Kindness Elves”, two magical elves who brought us a gift! It was the story, “The Hugasaurus” which centres around what a little dinosaur can do to help teach her friends to be kind a play together happily and harmoniously. The children have been thinking about this in their play and we have taken pictures of the children in provision sharing, being loving lions and working together being Teamwork Tigers, two of our most important character traits which the children are gradually being introduced to.

As our crew weeks drew to a close the children created a piece of special artwork which will be included in a unique crew final product which will be revealed later, but I can share our beautiful self portraits that will feature on it.

Finally we have celebrated with a lovely Teddy Bears picnic for our community crew on Friday. Each child brought in their favourite soft toy to share with their friends and we talked about how we all have different ones that are our favourites, as we all like different things making us all special. Yummy treats were enjoyed by all. Beautiful work Nursery.

Why is the seaside such a special place?

16th June 2026Sarah Winkley

Last week Nursery began exploring and investigating their final case study, Why is the seaside such a special place? We began by reading our key text, “Look what I found at the seaside”. This was an age appropriate non fiction text that delved into all of the natural elements and fun that could be explored at the seaside, through a short story and supporting facts with exciting illustrations to engage the children. They thought carefully about what their experiences of the seaside have been and each child spoke about why the seaside is a special place to them and their families. Their answers were scribed into a speech bubble for them.

On Tuesday we had a very exciting visit from Aqua Explorers, who provided the children with a Rockpool experience – just for Nursery. James (our expert visitor) brought lots of sea creatures with him including; Mussels, Spider crab, Shore crab, Hermit crabs, mutiple starfish, A Purple Sunblazed Starfish, Sea Anemones and a couple of Sea Urchins.

James explained to the children all about each sea creature and where they live and what they eat. The children were so engaged and asked some amazing questions throughout the experience. James was also blown away with the prior knowledge that the children had about some of the sea creatures when he asked them questions…. All of which has come from their learning throughout our expedition “What happens where the sea meets the shore?”

Each child was allowed and encouraged to touch some of the creatures. Most children were willing whilst others were trying to be brave, as it was a daunting prospect to touch an unfamiliar creature.

The following day the children used their experience and observation skills from memory and with photo support to draw the sea creatures. They did so well and included so much detail for the creatures features. Just look at their beautiful work!

Finally to bring all of our lovely learning and the week to a close the children create cardboard box Rockpool models. They painted their boxes first and then used a variety of materials and artistic skills to create sea creatures. They made cardboard tube sea anemones, playdough sea urchins with cocktail sticks, either a starfish using folded paper or a crab using craft materials and pipe cleaners. One of the children in the afternoon nursery brought back brightly coloured seashells from their holidays as a gift for the children so we included those too. Aren’t they absolutely amazing!?! The children have shown real quality of craftsmanship here! Well done Nursery beautiful learning – I am so proud.

Seaside Explorers.

22nd May 2026Sarah Winkley

Last week the children were hooked into our second case study about “Who would have adventures at sea?” Beginning with an immersive dress up day. Children came to school dressed in beautiful pirate, mermaid or other sea themed costumes. Teachers also dressed as a whole range of seaside explorers too, to broaden the ‘children’s understanding of who you may expect to see at the seaside having adventures. Don’t we all look brilliant!!

The children were engaged in story telling during Tranquil Tuesday crew, where they each acted out sea themed stories using props to use as problems and solutions, developing stories using our Tales Tool kit format. The children individually chose the props for the story they took part in making their story unique to them.

During our mindful Monday Crew the children made sea and sand sensory bottles to show them what happens where the sea meets the shore. This helped them to understand where people have adventures at sea and understand the concept of the stories being based either on or under the water.

Later in the week the children used a photo of them from our immersive dress up day, to help them write a sea themed adventure story using the tales tool kit format. The children chose whether they would be the character or the problem as some of our characters were goodies and some were more tricky! As the children told and drew their stories using a character, a setting, a problem and a solution, grown ups scribed for them.

Hooray for Fish!

12th May 2026Sarah Winkley

Last week the children had been focusing on our super sounds phonics story “Hooray for Fish!” by Lucy Cousins. We had been thinking about rhyming words within the story and linking the patterns on the fish to our maths work. The children have consolidated their understanding of repeating pattern and have had fun creating their own patterned fish to continue to immerse and decorate our environment with.

During our last expedition the children enjoyed an escape room delivered by an expert visitor, so we recapped on our learning during that session to activate their learning and I constructed a phonics based escape room where the children had to match pictures to uncover a letter shape. They then used the letter shapes to build a simple CVC word linking to our expedition of the where the sea meets the shore to be able to escape from a shark!

Harry Saves the Ocean!

12th May 2026Sarah Winkley

Our second exciting text of our continuing first case study; “How can we help save the ocean?” is “Harry Saves the Ocean” by NGK and Sylvia Fae. This week the children entered Nursery to their beloved beach role play area, being trashed by more plastic pollution! This consolidated all of their prior learning from last week as the began to think rubbish in the sea and as you can imagine the children were so disappointed, sad and angered! This time the children had the skills they needed to be able to help problem solve the solution and were very happy to help recycle the rubbish and plastics into the correct recycling bins.

This week the children have been exploring the properties of 2d shapes and have been thinking about how they could use the shapes to create pictures of sea creatures. Here are some photos of their beautiful work.

The children have also been writing lists of all the rubbish and packaging which they have found in the sea, by hearing and attempting to write initial sounds. They were working so hard on their listening skills and produced some beautiful mark making and letter shapes with support.

“Oh that’s rubbish!”

12th May 2026Sarah Winkley

During our first week of case study one “How can we help save the ocean?” Nursery were outraged to discover that someone had been into Nursery and thrown rubbish, mainly plastic, all over our environment. The children were totally hooked into the case study immediately and shared some of their thoughts about how could we play and thrive in this environment? How did all of the rubbish make us feel? “Sad”, “Angry”, “Messy”, “Cluttered”, “Dirty”, “Shocked”, “Fuming”, “Cross”, “Upset” were some of the words that the children used.

They then drew faces using different emotions to share their feelings. Some children attempted to write initial sounds of feeling words.

This led to us introducing our first key text “The Odd Fish” by Naomi Jones. A story about a fish who finds a lonely “odd fish” (a plastic bottle) who hasn’t got a family of it’s own and they go on a journey to find the odd fishes family, only to find more rubbish. We consolidated our learning by immersing our water tray and sea creatures in plastic. The children attempted to help the animals by putting all of the rubbish into a bin.

On “Wise Wednesday” the children went on a gallery walk to observes real life pictures of creatures trapped, stuck and tangled in plastic. From this the children were guided to created an anchor chart of all the reasons why plastic is not good for our seas and the environment.

As part of our thoughtful Thursday Crew we thought about ways in which we could help the creatures, by thinking about getting rid of the plastic and rubbish properly. The children were introduced to recycling and were shown how to sort materials and put them into the correct recycling bins. The children each had a turn at this and did a great job.

We’re on the Hook!

20th April 2026Sarah Winkley

The whole of EYFS last week were well and truly hooked, lined and sunk into our new summer expedition “Seaside Explorers, what happens where the sea meets the shore?”

The children explored various sea creatures introduced to them through our hook text, “Commotion in the Ocean”. Each crew were given a sea creature to investigate and research, using the internet and supporting non fiction texts. The children then compiled fact files about their given sea creatures and created a large scale piece of artwork between them working collaboratively. They had lots of fun doing this and found out the most amazing facts! Each crew have employed all of their artistic talents to really think about how the creatures look and bring out the best in their features.

Both Nursery and Reception classes presented their sea creatures and fact files to each other in our weekly community meeting. They were so excited to share their interesting facts and spoke thoughtfully and beautifully about their creatures and the new knowledge that they now have! We can’t wait to dive deeper into our thrilling summer expedition. Just look at the quality and craftsmanship of our work, the children really were Go for it Gorillas!