Merry Christmas!

Look what has finally arrived ready to cosy up for a relaxing week before Christmas!

We wish you all a Merry Christmas and look forward to a busy new year. 

Snow, mark making and baking!

We were so excited to last Tuesday to arrive at nursery and the playground was white!  Some of us decided to spend the whole session outside once we had wrapped up warm.  We were exploring all of the marks we can make in the snow with our feet, hands and some of the digging tools. We were fascinated with our foot prints and were seeing who could make the biggest!  We were using words such as cold, chilly, frosty, glittery and discussing that the snow looked like icing - we decided it might not be as nice to taste though. 

We experimented with snowballs, snow drifts and snowmen.  The children were showing each other the best way to make a snowball then how to roll it into a small snowman. 

We were so glad the children inside decided to make some warm buns for our snack.  They worked so well as a team reading the ingredients that were needed and measuring them out very carefully making the most delicious vanilla buns.  It warmed us right up again. 

Term 2 so far...

What a busy time we have had learning about Halloween, fireworks safety and our latest interest in the dark, bears and hibernation.  We were fascinated with Halloween the first week back and this dominated most of our conversations and questions.  We asked to set up a spooky corner which we had to use torches in to see.  We have lately been using this with lots of different types of lights i.e.  torches, string lights, glow in the dark shapes, the light box, overhead projector.  

We did lots of spooky activities around the nursery.

Painting with spiders

We made and explored Halloween playdough.  There were lots of spooky cakes and scary monsters made.

Our Song of the Week was the Skeleton Dance.  We knew all of the lyrics and moves by the end of the first day!

The most fun was had exploring our water tray where we were making lots of 'googly eye soup', 'spider soup' and magic potions.  

As the excitement of Halloween wore off, the excitement of fireworks night began!

We worked together in groups to create giant fireworks pictures of all the types of fireworks that we had seen.  We used lots of descriptive language whilst doing this teaching each other words such as whizz, bang, whirly, screechy, sparkly and many many more.  

We had great fun outside creating an even bigger fireworks picture altogether.  We loved the mess that splatter painting made and had as much fun cleaning up after ourselves!

Our interests have moved on, and although still interested in the dark, we have been speaking about bears a lot the past two weeks.  This week, we have been exploring the bear hunt.  We have been reading, singing and watching this story and I think we nearly all know it off by heart.  We went on our very own bear hunt adventure in the playground and were very worried that the bear was going to follow us back in to nursery.  Thank goodness for all of our doors to stop the bear getting in! 

 We set up sensory trays to represent each part of the story so have been exploring 'long wavy grass', 'a deep cold river', 'thick oozy mud', 'a big dark forest', a swirling whirling snowstorm' and 'a narrow gloomy cave'.  This has been re-enacted many many times in the nursery this week! We have been asking lots of excellent questions and sharing our knowledge of different types of bears, where they live, what they eat and why the hibernate.  

In the hall we have been having lots of fun playing with the giant parachute.  It is amazing how fast we can run to get to the other side without getting caught!

There has been a huge interest in writing, mark making and numbers these few weeks so we will be doing lots of activities with this over the next few weeks...all in time for Christmas Card writing!

Thank you for checking in on us.  We hope you enjoy reading about our activities as much as we have fun doing them!

Looking for Autumn

We have been spending the past few weeks looking for signs of Autumn around our garden and learning about what happens in Autumn time. 

 

We started off by exploring our Autumn talking tub which had lots of items to do with Autumn.  We talked about harvest, farming, hibernation and some of the changes that take place in nature.  

 

  We then explored our garden for fallen leaves and leaves that have changed colour. We were fascinated with the berries that had fallen off the trees for the birds to eat.

We then looked very closely at the leaves at drew black line drawings of them. 

 We talked about what colours we thought Autumn should be and painted some pictures which we are using to create an Autumn display. 

 We used some pinecones and nuts to explore sorting and counting.

 

We had clay out on our messy table and many of us decided that we wanted to make hedgehogs.  Some of us remembered doing this last year and wanted to do it again. 

We talked about the flowers that we would like to have next year and realised that we would have to plant some bulbs now so that they will grow next spring.

We are so excited to see what flowers will come and have been out checking them each day to see if anything has grown!

 We had some 'muddy' playdough out which we were pretending was fields.  We were busy 'ploughing' the field with our tractors and rolling pins then planting some seeds so that we had barley to harvest!  It was a very busy table. 

Our trip to the vets

 

We have been taking an interest in animals lately and have changed our house into a vets.  We arranged a trip to Northvets which has helped us to make our space even more exciting.  We were all very good whilst walking up to the vets.  When we got there, Gemma one of the veterinary nurses showed us around and told us lots about what they do at the surgery.  

 

 

First we had a look in the consulting room where the animals first go to be seen by the vet.  We saw the table that the animals sit on and were surprised to learn that vets use stethoscopes the same as doctors. 

 

 

Many of us tried out the scales to see how much the numbers moved. 

 

 

Next, we went to the room where the vets store all the medicines and have their machines for checking the animals blood.  We got to see how they worked and what some of the medicines looked like.

 

In the morning, we peeped inside the treatment room and got to see a dog having its teeth brushed.  

 

In the afternoon, we were able to go into the operating theatre and x-ray room to have a look at all the different equipment that is used.  

 

 

We were so excited to see the cat and dog kennels.  We were lucky enough to see some cats, dogs and rabbits whilst we were at the vet.  

 

 

Finally we had a little look around the main entrance at all of the posters, leaflets and things that people can buy at the vets.  We asked all sorts of questions and found out that they have never had any lions at the vet but they have had snakes, tarantulas, monkeys and tortoises as well as a small pony!  We thought it was very funny that a horse would fit inside the vets!  Gemma and the others at the vet were very kind and gave us all sorts of things to take back to school with us to put in our own vets.  We have added medicine bottles, syringes, leaflets, bandages, photos, x-rays, posters and a whole lot more.  Thank you to everyone at Northvet for letting us come up and have a look around.  We had a wonderful time.

Cloud Dough

As an alternative to sand, we had a go at making some cloud dough.  It is the most simplest recipe to follow - flour and baby oil!  The children very carefully measure out the flour then added the baby oil.  It was really sticky at first but when we had it all mixed together, it was silky smooth and crumbly to play with.  We loved it and explored it the whole day.  The children quickly noticed that it can be squashed together and it keeps it shape until you crush it up!  We spent a lot of time making walls and snow balls!