A warm welcome to our friends of Nursery P to our class page, where we will be sharing all of the fantastic things we have been learning in school.  

Miss Partington

Miss Wright & Miss Coffey

Miss Longshaw & Mrs Ireland 

Our Nursery day is a busy one, filled to support the children in all areas of our early years curriculum. Take a look at our timetable below. 

The weekly home learning support activities also play an important role in ensuring your child has the best start to their school life. If your need any guidance or support with this, a member of our Nursery team would be delighted to help!

This half term we have been looking at life cycles. Our first visitors into Nursery P were three little caterpillars. We read The Hungry Caterpillar to help us remember the different stages of their transformation ​​​​. Then, we patiently observed how they went into their chrysalis to transform into beautiful butterflies. We named them Paul, Billy & Lucy. 

Our second batch of visitors were some tiny tadpoles that we found in our forest school pond. The children learnt about the frog life cycle by researching different images on google. The children were amazed to learn about their transformation and the different things we need to do to look after the tadpoles. 

We also discussed the natural habitats of the creatures we were observing and decided that we would release them back into the wild before the holidays. The children loved watching the butterflies flutter into the forest school trees for the first time! We also released the tadpoles/ froglets back into our forest school pond.  We already can't wait to go back and see our friends in a few weeks time. 

You may have noticed that our terrace is looking a little greener thanks to our helpers in the Nursery classes. The children have been enjoying planting seasonal flowers in some donated welly boots. We have also been using our senses to explore our new herb garden, we particularly love the smell of our lemon balm!. We are excited to make some natural perfumes during the Summer term. 

This half term we are looking at celebrations! We have transformed our role play area into a church and will be looking at celebrations such as weddings, births, baptisms, birthdays & graduations.  

This week, we kick started our celebration topic by looking at weddings! The children spent the week learning about the different ways we celebrate weddings, and on Friday we had our very own Nursery wedding day! The children came to school in their wedding attire and enjoyed a wedding breakfast, followed by a ceremony and lots of dancing. Unfortunately the Haribo rings didn't quite make it to the end of the day...

Happy Birthday Barnaby Bear!

This week, we celebrated Barnaby Bear's birthday!  First, we looked at the different ways we can celebrate a birthday, the children recounted their own birthday celebrations and  discussed how they may send birthday cards, have a special meal, go to a party and give gifts. The children made invitations & decorated place mats in time for Barnaby's party on Friday. The children enjoyed playing numicon pass the parcel and dancing in their party clothes. The children were even allowed to bring a plus one (their favourite bear from home) to help celebrates Barnaby's special day. 

Thank you to all parents who donated cakes towards our EYFS bake sale. We managed to raise an astounding £170 towards St Joseph's Penny appeal. 

This term the children have been looking at numbers in the environment. They spent time exploring the outdoor area looking for different representations of numbers to 10.

The children in Nursery have begun their reading journey by taking part in daily phonics sessions. Phonics is a government produced teaching programme which runs throughout 6 phases. The children are currently working  withing phase one of Letters and Sounds which concentrates on developing the children's speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonic work which starts in Phase 2. The emphasis during Phase 1 is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills.

Phase 1 is divided into seven aspects. Each aspect contains three strands: Tuning in to sounds (auditory discrimination), Listening and remembering sounds (auditory memory and sequencing) and Talking about sounds (developing vocabulary and language comprehension). Below are some activities to support your child with phonics at home. Please speak to a member of the Nursery team if you would like some additional support. 

Farmer David heard how well we were looking after the chicks in school, so he wanted our help with some of the other animals on his farm. The children loved petting and feeding the animals, and Farmer David shared lots of interesting facts about the animals he brought.

Our Little Visitors!

The children arrived in school on Monday to find that there were some new additions to EYFS! Whilst the children waited patiently for  the chicks to hatch, we learnt all about how to care for the baby chicks. On Wednesday morning, the children arrived in school amazed that ALL of the chicks had hatched during the night! After the chicks had dried off, we spent time gently caring for our new little friends. We can't wait to see them grow over the next week.

Our topic this term is traditional tales! The children were very excited to bring these familiar stories to life in our classroom, particularly in our Storyteller's Cottage. The children have LOVED retelling their favourite stories whilst the adults scribed for them, they have even begun to tell their own stories! See if your child can orally retell one of the stories pictured below. 

Veggie Soup

This week we shared the story of The Three Little Pigs. The children were curious about what the little pigs were cooking in the pot, which we thought may be some hot, steamy soup; we decided we wanted to make it too! The children practised their cutting skills to prepare the vegetables for the soup. The children enjoyed eating the healthy treat at the end of the day. 

Meet Barnaby, our class bear!!

Barnaby will be spending his weekends with a special friend from our class, we can't wait to hear about all of his adventures on Monday mornings. 

Christmas is nearly here and we are feeling excited!! Our little elves have been busy in Santa's Workshop making wrapping paper, sorting the presents and writing letters to Santa. The children have been putting their cutting skills to the test as they choose the toys they would like to play with in our magazines... it looks like Santa is going to be very busy!!. Santa has given us a copy of his 'naughty & nice list', and has asked us to check it TWICE!!  HE has also sent us a cheeky elf named Buddy to check we are following our golden rules in school... so far so good!

'Guess the Fruit'

The children really enjoyed the 'guess the fruit' challenge, where they tasted a range of blended fruits we have looked at this week. The children's faces as they tasted the fruit were the best!!

The children have loved our focused text this week, Handa's Surprise.  We explored the different fruits in Handa's basket,  where we talked about how they felt and what we thought they would taste like. We also looked at the cheeky animals and worked together to match the animals to the fruit they took.  

During the Autumn term, we have been focusing on learning a wide range of nursery rhymes, we really enjoy joining in with the actions and the words! This has really helped us with our listening and attention during group time, particularly phonics where we have to really use our listening ears to tune in to the different sounds.  We have included some of our favourites below. 

The children have been enjoying baking each Friday afternoon, where they have been working together to measure, pour and mix the ingredients. Of course, the children's favourite part of baking is decorating and eating the end product!

This term the children have been braving the wet Autumn weather to visit our very own forest school venue! The sessions are led by our resident forest school lead Paul Brighouse, who will be spending some time with the children every Friday. The sessions will act as an enhancement to their current curriculum, and recently we spent some time exploring the different coloured leaves that had fallen on the ground. We also found some minibeasts that we safely held, and then put back into their natural habitat. 

This half term we have be looking at Autumn! We've enjoyed spending time observing the changes in our outdoor environment through our Autumn walks, where we collected leaves and other things that had fallen from the trees. Back in class we even researched the different animals that get ready to hibernate during this time of the year. We had lots of fun using our findings from the Autumn walk  for observational drawings, small world & craft activities. 

Storytelling is such a precious time in Nursery, which we use daily to expose the children to new language through high quality texts. This week we have focused on Michael Rosen's 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt'. As is it already a familiar story for most of our children, we focused on the children being able to orally rehearse the story themselves, with a little help from Michael Rosen himself (take a look at the video below).  We even recieved a letter from all of our class teddy bears explaining that they were playing hide and seek outside, and that we had to go on a bear hunt to find them! See if your child can retell the story at home!