If you go down in the woods….

30th April 2025Sarah Winkley

This week began with Nursery taking a trip into the woods (within school grounds) to explore and experience what it would be like to be inside a forest as part of our first case study; Where in the world will this story take you? Our first anchor text of this case study is the classic fairytale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The children were so excited to go on an adventure and were also a little bit nervous about who or what they would find in the woods, as they explored using their senses.

Once inside the woods the children were relieved to find there weren’t any wolves, bears or Gruffalo’s! We used our senses to think about what we could see, hear, smell and feel with both our hands and feet. The children were read the story inside the woods to set the scene and bring the story to life. They really enjoyed it and listened attentively whilst holding their sticks, leaves, flowers and ferns.

Once back in the classroom the children shared thoughts of their experience and completed a class sense map, noting down ideas of what they could see, hear, smell and feel. There were some beautiful thoughts and sentences that were communicated from the adventure which really helped the children to understand what a forest is. We have used this knowledge and experience to inspire large scale pieces of artwork, which will be part of our final product in terms of creating a story setting. The children also watched a short video of a virtual tour through Sherwood Forest, in Nottingham, where they tried to spot Robin Hood! They then compared that to the experience of our school woods in Norton and talked about what was the same and what was different? They soon realised that forests were much bigger with larger trees, thicker bushes and more undergrowth. They also learnt that not only animals but people could also possibly live in a forest like in olden times. You have been great geographers Nursery! Here’s a sneak peak of our artwork…

A week where Fairytale wishes do come true..

26th April 2025Sarah Winkley

To immerse and hook our Nursery children into our latest learning expedition “Once upon a time- who is hiding in the pages of this book?” We hosted a Fairytale Tea Party, with real china tea cups and where everyone came in their finest party clothes! The sun shone for us and the children really enjoyed spending special time together experiencing new things. To help the children understand what happens and how people behave at these splendid events, we first learnt a tea party song to the tune of “If you’re happy and you know it”. Why don’t you ask them to sing it to you?

In every good fairytale plot there is a mystery object that helps the hero or villain to succeed or cause mayhem! The children took part in a mystery object hunt, finding and naming the objects as they found them.

To embed the children’s understanding of these objects further and bring them to life we played a game of Pass the Parcel with the real objects hidden inside. This time the children discussed what the object was, how it feels and what it could be used for? The children had lots of fun and were really respectful and kind to each other by passing the parcel quickly and carefully to their friends.

As the week drew to a close the children work independently or in pairs as they wished, to decorate mystery objects using a variety of mediums such as felt tips, collage and special watercolour pencils. The importance of staying within the lines of the pictures was modelled to the children to help keep the shape of the mystery object, meaning that we would really need to be “Concentrating Crocodiles”. It was lovely to see the children who wanted to work in pairs, working out what they would like to create and choosing different children to work with, who wanted to create the same thing – being “Teamwork Tigers”. This beautiful artwork will be used to help create our final product. Well done Nursery, you were very pleased and proud of your beautiful work, as was I!

Down the rabbit hole for World Book Day!

10th March 2025Sarah Winkley

On Friday Nursery took part in the World Book Day celebrations happening across campus. We had a visit from the Mad Hatter and Alice who came to tell us an exciting story, “Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll. They also gave us a special invitation to a tea party, with strict instructions not to be late! The children looked amazing in their host of costumes, dressed as their favourite storybook characters and had lots of fun partying and sharing their stories with their friends.

Morning Nursery.

Afternoon Nursery

Happy World Book Day

10th March 2025Lauren Gate

On Friday we celebrated World Book Day! Class 6 looked absolutely awesome in their book themed costumes.

We started the day by creating crew book murals where we all thought about our favourite books and how we can represent them.

We had a fabulous Alice In Wonderland themed day where we took a trip to the mad hatters tea party and spent the morning using our imaginations to create our very own wonderlands!

Oi Frogs!

8th February 2025Sarah Winkley

Nursery have been very “hoppy” this week as they moved on to exploring the life cycle of a frog, continuing our “We are scientists” agenda of our expedition. We began our investigations with a very engaging and funny rhyming text by Kes Gray titled “Oi Frog!” The children immediately fell in love with the comedic main character Frog, who explored what a host of animals sit on, as he didn’t want to sit on a log, as Cat demanded he should. Nursery enjoyed matching animals to their rhyming seated objects and have practised independently over the week, even sharing their rhyming with their parents in our family stay and play session on Friday.

On Tuesday after the children were hooked into frogs, we investigated how a frog begins its life revisiting some of our prior learning from both caterpillar and chick life cycles. We placed toy models of the varying stages of frog into our cycle. The children connected that the caterpillars eggs and frogs were similar in more of a bubble kind of egg, rather than a shell. As we moved through the stages, the children suggested their own movements of how we could represent the cycle. We then played a game of “Froggy says…” called out the stages and the children demonstrated their moves to embed their learning.

During Tranquil Tuesday and Thoughtful Thursday crew the children followed models of how to draw a tadpole and a frog. They independently had a go with fantastic results! Such beautiful work.

The children used their scientific knowledge, construction and creative skills to create an egg box tadpole or frog, as a choice in provision. They copied examples and produced some amazing models!

Even our Maths work was frog themed, as we have been getting better at counting to three, using careful counting (touch counting to check our thoughts). We sang three little speckled frogs and acted out the song, supporting each other to count in sequence. Next we considered if we had three frogs, how many lily pads would they need to have one each? How many tadpoles if each had one baby? And how many flies they would need to feed the mummy frog? Of course I threw a few too many tadpoles and flies in the mix to check the children’s understanding, but there were “no flies on them” – the children could “toad-ally” see through my trickery.

Nursery then demonstrated and consolidated their understanding by counting out three frogs from a pond to a lily pad.

As a lovely end to our week we shared our learning with our families, playing in the provision during a family play and stay session. Mums, Dads, brothers and sisters, Grandmas, Grandads and Uncles all had lots of fun spending time and playing with their special little people. Thank you to all who attended and for all of your support, they were two beautiful sessions and we even squeezed in a demonstration of our daily Nursery Rhyme singing as part of our phonics!

Leading our own Learning

4th February 2025Laura Parsons

We have been learning about imperative verbs and time conjunctions this week to help us with our writing. We really have been leading our own learning by using the iPads to check our work before moving own.

Very impressive work class five – well done.

Mrs Parsons x

Spectacular Spelling in EYFS!

3rd February 2025Elouise Chadwick

This week in phonics we are spelling longer, more challenging words. The children truly blew me away with their attempts today. They used their segmenting fingers and wrote down all the phonemes they could hear in the word. Keep up the great work Class 1!

“Egg-stremely” exciting visitors.

2nd February 2025Sarah Winkley

This week Nursery and EYFS had the most exciting expert visitors arrive at school in their shells! The children have been hooked into our latest text “How does an egg hatch?” By Eric Carle by watching real chicken eggs hatch courtesy of The Happy Chick Company. The children were so excited and completely in awe of seeing the eggs and observing the daily changes of how the eggs have changed and chicks have grown and hatched. A truly magnificent experience met with care, concern and compassion for the chicks from our youngest children.

On the first day the children observed the eggs and made predictions of what would happen and who might come out of the eggs if they were left inside the incubator. Some of the children’s ideas included; “a penguin”, “a caterpillar”, “a dinosaur”, “a chicken”, “a duck” and “a baby chick”. They drew the eggs inside the incubator in our message centre (below).

On the second day the chicks had began to hatch and the children were amazed to witness the hatchlings make their journey out of the eggs using their “Egg Tooth” one of the new words we learnt from our key vocabulary. To consolidate their understanding of the hatching process the children took part in a chick life cycle hunt in our outdoor area. When the children found photos of the key points of development, they brought them to our crew circle and we examined them and ordered them in the correct sequence using key words from our Maths learning; “First, next and then”.

As we investigated the life cycle further Nursery thought about the most important stage of the cycle. Our text explained that the hen makes a nest that is “warm and dry” (more of our key vocabulary) using sticks and straw. The children explored that the eggs we had in school didn’t have a nest or a mummy hen to sit on them to keep them warm, instead they had an incubator to replace those things. However in the wild or on the farm, there probably wouldn’t be any electricity for an incubator, so the children learnt that building the nest as a “warm and cosy” home for the eggs to be sat on, is the most important part of the process that allows the fertilised eggs to grow. The children had lots of fun making their own chocolate coated shredded wheat nests and filling them with chocolate eggs to show the nests significance.

The children observed the changes in the state of the chocolate as it was melted and then again as it was mixed with the shredded wheat and cooled in the fridge to harden again. They thought carefully of the order in which they were constructing the nests, again using our sequencing vocabulary; “First, then and next”.

In provision this week the children have learnt the song “Chick, Chick, Chick, Chick, Chicken”, painted chicks using yellow paint and a fork to mark on their fluffy feathers. They have sculpted eggs, nests and chickens from play dough, taken part in a cut and stick version of the life cycle of a chick practising their cutting skills. The children have also examined and matched mummy and baby animals together in pairs, learning the new vocabulary of the infant animals names eg; Horse and foal, Cow and calf, Duck and duckling and noticing the differences between the young and older animal as they grow and change.

Finally Nursery were super excited and eager to prepare their own chick box in preparation for us to host our own chicks in Nursery, now that they are all hatched and getting stronger and ready to be handled with care.

Truly beautiful work – well done everyone!