Mad about Mini Beasts

4th October 2026Sarah Winkley

This week Nursery have been continuing to think about “What Does Caring Look Like?” This time we have been considering the smallest of creatures and how we can help to take care of them. The children were hooked in to the week with an engaging Tales Tool Kit story, featuring several mini beasts including a spider, a butterfly and a dragonfly. The children used actions, large muscle movements and sounds to help them retell the story of how the Dragonfly, rescued the Butterfly, who had become trapped in the Spider’s sticky web.

They were then introduced to our key text of the week, “Mad about Mini-beasts” which we shared unpicking tricky vocabulary. From the text, each Crew were given a large scale mini-beast to research and decorate. With support, the children accessed fact files about their given mini beast, which was either a Snail, a Beetle, a Spider or a Caterpillar. The children made observations of the creatures and began to create their own masterpieces.

The children painted, pinched, twisted, glued, stuck and sprinkled collage resources onto their mini beasts to make them as eye catching as possible to contribute towards our final product for our expedition.

Nursery children had lots of fun during their outdoor learning this week, focusing on finding different bugs and mini beasts in our lovely outdoor area. The children investigated our new Bug Hotel, Nature Nook area, using magnifying glasses, binoculars and books to check for bugs. They also found a very large spider hiding in the mud kitchen, several ladybirds, a furry white, stripy caterpillar and a white coloured Beetle. From our fact files the children had learned about what kind of habitats the creatures like to live in and this made for some very engaging and meaningful interactions about how we can care for the bugs, by being gentle with them, giving them food and the kind of home they like, such as leaves, mud and wood.

In provision the children made mini beast prints in the play-dough, using their fine motor skills to push toys into the play-dough to create marks and imprints. They also pinched, squeezed and placed buttons to fill up mini beast templates creating pictures and copied and traced mini beast movement patterns to make marks in our messy mark making tray.

Finally in our maths learning we were thinking about patterns that we can see around us and the children learnt new vocabulary identifying spots, stripes and plain patterns. The children used their sorting knowledge to help sort mini beasts with spotty, striped or plain patterns into groups.

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!!

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!

Where will our vehicles take us?

18th March 2026Sarah Winkley

Last week Nursery brought case study three of our expedition to a close by thinking about “Where will your vehicle and imagination take you?”

We all bordered the “Imagination Station Train” and pretended as we chugged along the tracks and pulled into lots of imaginary worlds. The journey began by being modelled to the children, encouraging them to think of far away or imaginary places, such as Lollipop land or Chocolate World. As the children became immersed in their play, they began to suggest stops of their own such as Dinosaur Land, The Jungle, Mermaid World, Unicorn Land and Sweetie Town.

The children were then asked if they could go in any vehicle, to any place – Where would it be? How would they get there? And most importantly what would their vehicle be powered by? The children made some wonderful suggestions using their imagination and knowledge, built up from throughout the expedition, really consolidating their learning. We really have been on the move!

In provision the children also explored, used their imaginations and translated their learning to create their own imagination station journeys.

Mindful Monday

9th March 2026Sarah Winkley

Today in Crew Nursery kicked back with a follow up activity to world book day. They each attempted a Fairytale character Hide and Seek. The children looked for traditional characters and counted how many times they could spot them. Most children attempted to write numbers or make marks to represent what they had found. Amazing work and lots of fun!

World Book Day 2026.

9th March 2026Sarah Winkley

On Friday Nursery celebrated World Book Day. Children were so excited to come to school in fancy dress as a book character or with their home made Dr Seuss inspired crazy hat. All children and hats looked absolutely amazing!

We celebrated with a a host of book inspired small world activities where children could create their own stories around their favourite characters.

We made bookmarks to help keep our place in our books….

Finally we used our tales tool kit writing frame to help us tell stories by cutting and sticking characters and drawing our own settings. These were amazing, the story language and creativity that the children used was fabulous.