We have loved welcoming our January starters (little acorns) this term, and our big acorns have done a wonderful job at showing their friends their way around the nursery, and showing them our routines! Our little acorns have been sharing their ‘all about me’ boxes with the other children as well as the Nursery staff, and have loved talking about their families and what they enjoy. We have been looking at forming new friendships, and being kind and caring to our peers, Nursery have done a wonderful job with this.
Our topic in SCARF has been ‘Keeping Myself Safe’. Through this term we have talked about people who keep me safe, as well as safety indoors and outdoors. We have practised this through activities such as crossing a ‘road’ in our nursery garden. The children have also been practising their self care skills by brushing their teeth daily with our Big Brush Club. With this we have also really practised our hand washing. This topic leads into our ‘Rights and Responsibilities’ focus, where we will learn how to look after ourselves, each other, and the environment. This includes healthy eating and how to grow fruit and vegetables!
Communication and language is a big focus area for all of the children in Nursery, especially for our little acorns. This area is developed from the moment they step into Nursery, in lots of different ways. For example during their ‘All About Me’ boxes, the children will talk about the things and people that they love, giving them the confidence to talk in front of new people. The children find new communication partners in their new friends, and are wonderful role models for each other.
We also develop our communication and language skills through our WellComm sessions. Our focus in Spring Term for Wellcomm is learning to talk through play, and joining in with familiar stories and rhymes. We practice this every day, in our nursery rhyme time. The children have absolutely loved singing so far this term, and it has been great to hear the new voices of the little acorns.
We also encourage the children to share their ‘wow’ moments from home on Tapestry (our online learning tool), and we are working on asking appropriate questions to what we see, and how we can be great listeners. The children feel a lot of pride in showing their tapestry, and are always very excited to share.
During our Spring term, the children are focusing on negotiating space and objects safely, using a range of tools effectively including pencils, and demonstrating strength, balance and co-ordination. The children learn these skills throughout their time at nursery, especially during continuous provision, where the children can play inside or outside. Our nursery garden provides plenty of space for the children to develop these skills, with sand and water areas, as well as having trikes and scooters to ride along the path. We also have our lunch in the nursery and practice using our knives and forks to cut up our own lunches.
Each morning we complete ‘funky fingers’ activities, that change daily. These help the children to improve their fine motor skills, which enables them to start their early writing journey. The children are given a wide range of tools to use, including pencils, rollers, chalk, rolling pins and cutters.
In Nursery we also use our Healthy Movers programme, which helps the children develop their fine and gross motor skills through a range of fun activities and games. We complete these sessions weekly throughout the year, and throw in a couple of extra games to fit in with our topic of the term!
We also have a Squiggle Whilst You Wiggle programme, where the children develop their early writing skills through a series of whole-body movements. We use both hands, and practice different motions such as up and down and side to side. These sessions are short and fun, and include some funky music to wiggle to!
In Nursery one of our main aims is to instill a love of reading for every child. We read books every day, and have books all over our Nursery to allow children to read with their peers, by themselves, or with an adult. We have nursery rhyme time, and some of the rhymes we focus on in Spring term are Jack and Jill, 1,2,3,4,5, once I caught a fish alive, and Wind the bobbin up, which all of the children love to sing.
Our literacy learning stems from the Little Wandle letters and sounds programme, which helps all of the children start listening out for sounds, so that when it comes to starting to read in Reception, our children are ready. We play games such as ‘Bertha the Bus’, ‘What’s in the box?’ and ‘Tap the sound’, where the Nursery children have fun and learn simultaneously.
Maths is everywhere in Nursery, indoors and outside. We count the blocks in our towers, measure how long we can go on the trikes outside and make shapes in our creative areas. The children are wonderful math detectives, and can see when an opportunity to learn arises.
In Spring Term, we are focusing on the numbers 3,4, and 5. We have used stories such as ‘3 little pigs’ to consolidate this learning, and shapes that relate to these numbers. We have put learning resources in each area for the children to be exposed to these numbers and learn them primarily through play. The children loved finding 5 at home and in their classroom.
Since we have started in September, Nursery have been very busy discussing how there are lots of people around the world who celebrate all kinds of wonderful things. We have learnt all about Diwali, the festival of light, where the children made glittery firework pictures and read interesting stories to gain a deeper understanding of the celebration. We have also learnt about Chinese New Year, the children performed a dragon dance, made Chow Mein, and learnt all about the year of the Snake.
We have also learnt all about ourselves, and the people in our families in our ‘People who help us’ topic, where we had the opportunity to meet real fire fighters, a carer, and a real mummy and their baby. These people all explained what they do and how they can help people. We reflected on this and thought about how we can help the people close to us too, this could be through helping them put on their coat, to being kind to our friends every day.
In Spring, we are noticing the seasons change, the sun coming out and the days getting longer. We will be planting seeds, and noticing how they grow throughout the year. We will be using all of our senses to notice change, this could be the leaves, the sky and the weather.
We love to make art in Nursery, and have plenty of opportunities to create in our ‘busy bee’ time, where the children have continuous free flow provision and can choose to play anywhere in the Nursery. Our creation station is very popular and provides a variety of textures to explore and create with, including paint, glue, sticks, and lots more!
We have looked at who we are, and made self portraits to explore what features we share, and how we are different. We then celebrated the fact that everyone is different using books such as ‘the colour of us’. The children loved using mirrors to see what colour eyes they have, and looking around the nursery to see what colour eyes everyone else has! We talked about how even if two people look alike, it does not mean they enjoy the same things, as every person is unique.
We also love to sing in nursery, and have daily sing and sign sessions where we sing classic nursery rhymes, as well as other songs, and learn the Makaton signs alongside them to aid our knowledge and communication skills. This term, we will be exploring music in more depth by introducing new instruments and opportunities to create.
