Nursery Cotton

This week, we have been learning about mini beasts. Mini beast are very small creatures,  so we have been using our looking eyes and magnifying glasses to carefully explore different places around school. We found ants, ladybirds, snails, slug, caterpillars.

On Tuesday, five special caterpillars arrived at schools. We were very excited and have been busy learning all about our new friends. We have learnt how our new caterpillar friends are going to change into a beautiful butterflies. Everyday, we have been watching them grow and have really enjoyed talking about the changes. We think they will form a chrysalis soon.

Whilst school is closed, I will be updating the class page on a weekly basis with a weekly learning map and interactive activities. Please check back regularly for these updates. 

If you have any specific curriculum questions during this period, please does not hesitate to send an email to the following address: 

nurserycotton@hotmail.com

I will be checking this email on a daily basis. 

It would also be fantastic to hear all about your home learning experiences, so please share any pictures or videos using the email address.

Many thanks

Miss Cotton

The text of the week is 'The Queen's Hat'

Please complete the daily calendar each morning, using the interactive videos below. As you work through each video discuss with your child the key questions in their home learning books. 

Ask your child:

• What day is it today?
• What day will it be tomorrow?
• What month of the year is it?
• What the weather is like today?
• To draw a picture of what the weather is like today, you can use the symbols to help.
• How will they need to dress today?
• What season are we in?

Remind your child to scribe what the weather is like in their home leaning book each day. Also discuss the structure of your day and what that will involve. 

Below are some interactive phonics videos, your child will be familiar with these as they are used regularly in the classroom. Please use these resources to help your child's early reading skills.

Ways to use these videos:

• Encourage your child to join in with the familiar songs.
• Pause the videos at different points and ask your to make the sound
• Find an item around your home with the same sound as the one played on the videos.

Please make use of the free subscription to the Phonics Play website whilst your child is learning from home. Nursery are working on Phase 1 activities.

Previous home learning resources

Coronavirus Story - Supporting children to understand our current situation

At the moment we are all experiencing a very uncertain period of time whereby we are all unsure what is going to happen in the near future. Below is a link to a story which has been written specifically to explain the Coronavirus epidemic to younger children, and advise them on what they can do to help. Please remember that during this time, children could be confused and worried about the current situation, so this story may help them understand it a little better.

https://nosycrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Coronavirus_INS.pdf

 Week 9 learning map 

Week 8 learning map

RE - The Ascension

Week 7 learning map

Week 6 learning map

Weekly learning map 

Week 5

A big well done to all of the children that participated in the boiled egg competition,you all did a fantastic job. Well done to our winner!

Thank you to everyone else that has taken part! 

Hi Nursery,

Just a little note to say how impressed we are with your home learning over the past three weeks. It has been lovely to see you continuing to practise that things we have been learning in school with your grown ups at home; we hope you have enjoyed the special challenges! Most importantly, we feel incredibly proud to see that you are continuing to be Stay at Home Superheroes, and though we miss you all everyday, we are are happy to hear that you at keeping safe indoors and creating special memories with your family. 

Lots of love,

Miss Cotton

Boiled Egg Competition 

Whilst we won't be uploading a learning map during the Easter half term, instead we have decided to have a special Easter competition. During the holidays, we would like you to spend some time designing & decorating a hard boiled egg. First, you will need to think about what you will transform your egg into, you may want to draw a design in your home learning book. Then,you can think about what materials you will use around your home to decorate your egg. Once you have designed and decorated your egg, email a photograph to NurseryCotton@hotmail.com no later than Friday 17th April. Mr Deane will choose the winning egg and a prize will be posted to them the following week!

Holiday Diary

During the Easter break, we would also like you to draw a picture in your home learning book each day of how you are feeling and the things you have been doing/going to do that day. 

Weekly learning map 

Week 3 - Holy Week

Hi Nursery,
I hope you are all well and enjoying your time at home. It has been lovely to hear from you this week, I can see you have all been working very hard.

Please keep sending you amazing work to nurserycotton@hotmail.com

I can't wait to hear from you.

Additional Week 3 learning map resources 

Language Enrichment - Pronoun cards - he, she, they, it

Weekly learning map 

Week 2

Please keep sharing photographs and videos using nurserycotton@hotmail.com 

It has been fantastic to hear from you all this week!

​​​​​​

Week 2 

Our story for the week is The Gingerbread Man

Please see the weekly learning map for key questions to ask your child.

Additional resources for Week 2 learning map

Biscuit recipe - Have a go at making your own gingerbread man!

Shape pictures 

Phonics - Red Group - CVC cards 

Weekly learning map

Week 1

Below is the learning map for this week. The learning map has lots of activities that can be completed using the resources from the home learning pack and/or everyday objects from around the house.

Additional resources for Week 1 learning map

Moon for anticlockwise movements

Progressive pencil control

Your child will develop their pencil grip when developmentally ready. Some children will move progressively through these stages, others will skip over stages to achieve a tripod grip. It important you child also continues to develop their gross motor skills as well as their tripod grip with good control. The gross motor and fine motor activities on the learning map will support their development in these areas.

Why cards

Week 1

Our story this week is 'Hansel and Gretel'

Additional stories you could read to your child:

- Rosie's walk

- We're going on a bear hunt

These stories also link to the activities on the weekly learning map.

Welcome to Nursery C's class page

Miss Cotton
 Miss Harrison, Miss Mesjacz and Miss Oakes 

Nursery C have made a fantastic start! Over the last four weeks, the children have settled into Nursery and have begun to follow everyday routines. They have enjoyed selecting and using new and exciting resources in the classroom and have begun to develop good listening skills during carpet and small group activities. 

The children are also developing their independence with everyday activities such as toileting, changing some clothes, putting on shoes and eating with a knife, fork and spoon. You may also notice they are becoming increasingly independent at home too! Please continue to support and encourage your child to complete small everyday tasks by themselves.

Our First Week!

Every week, we take part in RE sessions. During the sequence of RE sessions, we will think about our own experiences, develop our understanding and reflect. After group time, we also continue to develop our thinking and learning within the Nursery provision.

During the session, we talked about our favourite activities with our friends and thought what makes a 'good friend'. Within provision, we worked really hard on developing our relationships with others especially when sharing our favourite toys.

It is more fun and exciting when we play together!

We explored what a church is and talked about who we may visit a church with. We also used interactive resources to explore what you can see and do at church 

"people sing songs" 

"there is special water" - font

"we go with friends"

"Jesus"

"You get a book" - hymn book 

We also practised singing some of our favourite hymns, just like we would at church with our family and friends.

This week, we have been looking at Autumn. We have been doing lots of interactive learning and exploration of our outdoor environment. We have also been on an Autumn walk to look for the signs of Autumn. On our walk we found orange, yellow, red and brown leaves, bare trees with little red berries and little brown pine cones. Back in the classroom, we have been sorting and categorising leaves by their properties e.g colour and by size. Some leaves were really tricky to sort as they were really colourful!

This week, we have been busy exploring the festival of light, known as Diwali. During the Hindu festival, people are very busy preparing their homes and community for the celebrations. In Nursery we have explored some of the Hindu traditions, such as eating traditional food, making diva lamps and creating our own Rangoli patterns. We also helped to clean the outdoor area with brushes, towels, water spray bottles and buckets of water ready for the celebrations.

Over the next few weeks, we will be taking part in lots of Christmas activities in the build up to Baby Jesus' birthday, known as Christmas Day. We have already been working hard in our Winter Wonderland; writing labels, decorating the Christmas tree, packaging presents and writing letters to Santa.

We have also been visited by one of Santa's special elves, his name is Buddy, he has been sent from the North Pole by Father Christmas!

Take a look!

Christmas is a special time of the year as it symbolises the birth of Baby Jesus. In Nursery, we have been practising for our Nativity and have been talking about the special people who came to visit the son of God in Bethlehem.​​​​​​ We have also been discussing the special gifts the three wise men brought Baby Jesus and have had a go at drawing our own presents for Baby Jesus.

Every Friday, we like to mixing, stir, bake, roll and cut to create delicious food linked to our weekly topics. We also enjoy trying new foods, textures and tastes.

Here are some of our delicious treats.

Since coming back to school, we have been very busy in all the different areas of the classroom leading our learning. We have especially enjoyed exploring in our new role play area 'The Storyteller's Cottage'. 

Throughout the Spring term, we are continuing to explore and develop our understanding of numbers 1-10. We have also been exploring numbers in many contexts and some of us have begun to accurately represent an amount using marks independently. We are also becoming super speedy at recognising numicon.

Throughout the Spring term, we will be reading lots of traditional tales, such as Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and the Three Bears and The Gingerbread Man. These stories will be linked to lots of our learning experiences in the classroom.

Please keep checking throughout the term for updates!

Goldilocks and Three Bears 

We started our topic of traditional tales with Goldilocks and Three Bears. This story has inspired many of us to use our imagination when playing in different areas of the classroom. For example, some children decided to re-build Baby Bear's chair after Goldilocks broke it! Whilst others, have particularly enjoyed writing letters to the three bears and recreating bear faces with play dough. On Friday, we also tried some porridge just like the three bears.

The Three Little Pigs

This week we read the story of the The Three Little Pigs. We have spent lots of time retelling the story, talking about our favourite events in the story and even creating our own houses for the 3 little pigs. We have also been preparing to make vegetable soup just like the stew in the brick house.

Jack and the Beanstalk 

This story has been a particular favourite in Nursery C and became a focus for our learning focus this week. We have loved talking about the feelings of the different characters and the size of different objects in the story.  During group time, we have been talking about size and have used our looking eyes to search the class room for big and small items. We also have begun to order different items by size and some have even begun to use exciting adjectives to describe big and small objects, such as gigantic, little, tiny, enormous. We have also had a go at planting our own beanstalks, just like the one Jack climbed!

Little Red Riding Hood

In the story of Little Red Riding Hood, we met Grandma, Little Red Riding Hood, the brave woodcutter and the Big Bad Wolf again! We have met the Big Bad Wolf in many stories, so explored the character in depth this week. We have investigated the wolfs huff and puff and used our noses to smell different foods. We have even made cakes for Grandma to make her feel better. 

Our Beanstalks have grown!

We have been doing a fantastic job of growing our beanstalks in Nursery C! They have grown so big, we have replanted them into bigger plant pots. We hope the continue to grow into beanstalks just like Jack's!

We have been exploring what our plants need to grow! We know they need lots of sunlight and water to help the beanstalk grow big and strong. We also need the following equipment; plant pot, watering can, shovel and seeds.

Growth and Decay 

Some of the beanstalks have now grown into very tall plants, however others have died and the leaves have fallen off. We have been paying close attention to our beanstalks and have observed many changes. We have been using our mark making skills to record our observations.

'It is broken' 'They need water' 'It has died, they have no water'
'more soil' 'They need sun'

This week, we have had some special visitors in Nursery. On Monday, 6 small special eggs arrived from Farmer David's farm. We talked about what could be inside and made lots of exciting suggestions. We talked about how there could be dinosaurs, ducks, snakes, and chicks inside. 

The next morning, 6 special fluffy chicks hatched out of the eggs. We named them Goldichick, Fluffy, Yellow and Brown. We were very careful when handling the chicks as it was really important we did not scare them. 

Now we have had the chicks for a few days, we have begun to understand the life cycle of the chicks. In class we have been watching videos, talking about the changes and sequencing images to support our understanding.

Pancake day has arrived! We took this opportunity to explore sharing with our friends. We had lots of different toppings to choose from, but we had to think carefully about how much to take as we all needed a little bit each. We shared the different toppings between different numbers of friends. The chocolate spread was shared between 9 friends, the raspberries were spilt between 4 and the sugar and lemon was shared between 7 friends. ​We used our supper counting skills to help us do this.