Tranquil Tuesday in the Sunshine
Category : English
A week where Fairytale wishes do come true..
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!
Reading Super Stars ⭐️
These children blew me away today! Not only did they read their new text beautifully but they managed to read all their words including the tricky words to play our game!
Keep it up – Mrs Parsons xx
Down the rabbit hole for World Book Day!
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
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!
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
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!
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.
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!
The life cycle of a caterpillar.
This week Nursery have become Scientists by observing the changes that happen in animals as part of our first case study, through our key text The Very Hungry Caterpillar for a second week. The children have closely examined the pictures within our story to work out what the physical changes in the caterpillar are. An egg, a tiny caterpillar, a cocoon or chrysalis and then a butterfly. Some of the words used to describe the above were as follows;
Egg – “Circle”, “Tiny”, “Bubble”, “White”, “Spot” and “Dot”.
Caterpillar – “Tiny”, “Big, fat caterpillar”, “Wriggly”, “Green” and “Bumpy”.
Cocoon – “Like a sleeping bag”, “shell”, “like a stick”, “Wood” and “egg”.
Butterfly – “Rainbow”, “Beautiful”, “Wings” and “Flappy”.
Nursery read another text which focused more on the life cycle and explained how the changes take place called Little Caterpillar by Autumn Publishing. I then modelled to the children how to draw a life cycle to help embed the cycle in their minds and demonstrate it was a loop (cycle) that started over and over again.
In our provision the children had the opportunity to explore and examine toys representing the life cycle.
We consolidated the events that helped make the life cycle process possible by playing the fruit game. The caterpillar ate lots of fruit to be able to make him grow. The children had to listen and run to a fruit called out by their grown up as part of activating our brains, it was lots of fun!
The children also revisited their previous learning from the week before when they painted beautiful pictures of the fruit. They each looked closely at their pictures and chose at least one piece of fruit and (with support and modelling) began to write the first letter sound for that item using their phonetic knowledge. Eg; Banana – b, Apple – a or Strawberry – s.
In provision the children independently used collage to create beautiful pictures of fruit and the caterpillar at various stages. They also created beautiful butterflies in the play dough and on the painting easel.
As the week progressed the children each worked with an adult and explained the process of the butterfly life cycle using the toys as physical props to help organise and consolidate their understanding of the life cycle. They were each recorded and were able to recall key vocabulary and other significant events within the story. Such beautiful work!
