Nursery Newsletter

We have had a fantastic time in Nursery over the past couple of weeks.  We have had a brilliant hands-on experience with a real life minibeast – Joe Turbo, the African snail, has been visiting our nursery this week courtesy of Olivia and her family.  The children have had a wonderful time holding and touching Jo Turbo and learning all about how to look after a pet snail.  Thank you very much, Olivia, for letting us borrow Joe for a few days.

We have also been creative this week making our own versions of Henri Matisse’ ‘Snail’.  We read the book ‘Snail Trail’ by Jo Saxton (about a snail who visits many artists masterpieces before finally finding his own portrait) and then made paper plate snails by cutting strips of coloured paper and gluing them onto the plate.  We also used Purple Mash on the iPads to create digital versions of Matisse’ snail.

In our SCARF sessions we have been thinking about how we can be great friends.  We thought of the ways that we can be good friends such as being kind, sharing, being fun, helping when we are hurt, etc. We wrote all our ideas down on paper and mixed them up in a big bowl to make ‘Friendship Soup’ and then we had a pretend taste of our special friendship soup!

Over the past couple of weeks, we have had ‘real’ caterpillars living in our nursery.  We have been observing them grow and change into cocoons.  This week, they emerged from their cocoon’s as beautiful butterflies.  We kept them for a couple of days to observe them and then released them in the playground.

The sunflowers we planted have now started to grow.  As part of our maths activities, we have been measuring them using cubes (non-standard units).  We will continue to observe and measure them over the coming weeks.

In PE we have been using bean bags to develop balancing skills.  We have been balancing bean bags on different parts of our bodies such as our head, shoulder, hand, foot, neck, etc. and carefully moving around the space.

Also, for maths we have been comparing lengths and using the language long, longer, longest, short, shorter, shortest.  We did this by choosing a special 'measuring' minibeast then making our own minibeast out of playdough.  We compared them, saying which one was longer, or shorter.