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!